Et sidera propagantur ex caldariam
by kedrann
Summary: In 1985, as the Senshi faced Galaxia, a risk was taken and a different outcome obtained. Two survived while all the others died and they worked to accomplish a promise, waiting for their friends' return.
1. Divergence

_Author Notes: this story was initially posted on Twisting the Hellmouth and is a reboot of an older fic called 'Stars Reborn'. The central ideas remain (this is mostly a Buffy/Sailor Moon/Rosario+Vampire fic and an uchronia) but as my style has evolved, I chose to rewrite it completely and redo some background elements. The goal is, in general, to obtain a better constructed world and a better written story. _

_**Summary: **__In 1985, as the Senshi faced Galaxia, a risk was taken and a different outcome obtained. Two survived while all the others died and they worked to accomplish a promise, waiting for their friends' return. _

_**Disclaimer**_

_Warning: as this story is an uchronia and one of my 'merged universes', some things will change drastically from canon. _

_**Fandom I do not own anything of:**_

_- Buffy the Vampire Slayer _

_- __Rosario+Vampire (manga)_

_- __Cat's Eye (manga)_

_- __Angel Heart (manga)_

_- __Sailor Moon (manga)._

_- __The Final Countdown_

_Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed by Masamune Shirow, Neuromancer by William Gibson, GURPS Transhuman Space and Cyberpunk 2020 for terms and concepts, though they are often generic. _

_**Rating: **__FR18__** / **__M___

_- Unknown Space-Time Coordinates -_

The two young women were walking with great difficulty. One had jet black hair in a bob cut, with a perfect pale skin that would have made the envy of many conservative ladies in Japan. At the moment, she wasn't feeling really pretty, though. Her clothes were torn and she was covered in clotted blood. She was also limping, using her glaive as a walking stick. At her side, a pink-haired woman with a haircut that seemed to be a mix of ox buns and a twin ponytail was almost grappling her. She stopped for an instant, catching her breath.

"We have to move, Usagi. The singularity is closing," said the dark-haired one.

The other nodded painfully and resumed her walk, trying to control her shivers. The path that seemed cut out of a ribbon of starry night absorbed the sound of their feet, winding through a tunnel of blackness whose walls were traveled by opalescent waves. Behind them, the tunnel was collapsing, closing the gate to a place that resided at the same time outside of what is and at the center of it. The woman with the glaive had a look backwards, feeling the delicate balance between Order and Chaos once again restored.

_I hope the price was worth it… I will keep my promise, Setsuna-mama. _

"Hotaru? Are you… still yourself?" asked the pink-haired one.

"Y… no, not in the way you mean. You remember when you saw me right before I nuked Pharaoh 90?"

"The cold and aloof you… you seemed so lonely back then… that means, you remember the Silver Millennium like Mina-chan and Mom did?"

"Yes… and no. All of them only remembered of that era what Selene – your grandmother – wanted them to remember. I remember everything."

"What do you mean?"

"Selene… I'll tell you more later but she wanted to spare us… and by doing so deprived us of our real strength."

Usagi shivered once again. She could feel the aura of Hotaru. It had been building up since Sailor Pluto did something to her… probably breaking all the seals on her power and memories. Hotaru had been one of the most innocent among the Sailor Senshi. The fully awakened Saturn, on the contrary, deserved every bit of her title of Soldier of Destruction.

_If she had been awakened all along… our enemies would have been wiped out like lesser Youma. But was it worth it? This darkness I feel in her…_

Her gaze fell on Saturn's eyes and she gasped. Gone was the shy, innocent black she was used to. Her irises were scarlet, with vertical, slit pupils. She also felt… stronger and Usagi was almost certain that most of Hotaru's wounds had disappeared.

"Hotaru… your eyes…"

"My body is remembering, too, Usagi. Again, I'll explain more later but the Sailor Senshi only look human. Back in the Silver Millennium, there was one species on each planet."

The pink-haired Senshi screamed. She felt her insides twisting as she clung desperately to Saturn. Something was being torn out of her, trying to suck her whole being into oblivion. Hotaru held her with an arm that seemed stronger than steel and jumped. Reality shifted in a demented maelstrom of colors, finally settling in a huge room with a purple marble floor.

"Hush," said Hotaru as she lowered her friend on the ground, keeping her on her knees. "It's gonna be all right."

"It hurts!"

Dazed by the pain, she saw Saturn leaning on her, then the brush of her lips on her neck. Before she had even the time to tell her friend that she didn't like her that way, she felt a piercing, needle-like pain followed by something else. There was a warmth spreading from the place Hotaru's mouth was glued on her, like a sweet, dark fire that crept through her veins, dulling the pain and restoring her strength. As the Senshi of Saturn lifted her head, Sailor Chibimoon was almost tempted to embrace her, to make her stay.

"Here," said Hotaru, her lips bloody and her fangs so white in the light that played on the rings of the planet Saturn, clearly visible through the windows. "My blood will help you make the transition."

"Vampire… you're a vampire."

Hotaru rose, lifting her friend in her arms like if she weighted nothing. There was a flash of purple light and they found themselves in a palatial room of what Usagi was now certain to be Castle Titan.

"I'm a Saturnian, a Raksha to use the old name," she said as she laid her friend on the bed. "Before you ask, my blood will not change you into one of my… subjects. For a Lunarian like you, it is merely a more potent version of my healing power. You need it. What you're feeling is your link with the thirty first century Silver Crystal being severed."

"Pluto… she asked you to build a better future… a future where I won't be born. How long do I have until the time stream erases me?"

Saturn smiled gently to her. Usagi Tsukino Junior, also known as Small Lady Serenity and Sailor Chibimoon, had been her first friend, the first one to see further than her strangeness. Later, Hotaru had learnt that her friend was a time traveler, the daughter of Sailor Moon coming from a distant future. But, now, because of choices taken during the Sailor Senshi's last battle, this future leading to Crystal Tokyo had no chance to happen. Usagi's Sailor transformation finished to fade, revealing her civilian clothes.

"This is of no importance to you. You are stranded here, but Setsuna-mama knew what she did. There are ways to… cheat."

"How?"

"Like this," replied Saturn, taking a mirror and lifting it so that her friend could see her face.

Shaking, Usagi put a hand to her brow as the reflection revealed it to her. She cried as her fingers traced the moon crescent that adorned it. She was used to its shape, though it manifested rarely. The issue was with the color. It wasn't its usual golden but of a black so deep it seemed to suck on light.

"No… No!" she yelled as she punched the mirror away. "I… not like that! I don't want to be evil again!"

The Black Moon, the symbol of the Black Moon Clan, of Nemesis. She remembered her fall in their hands, the corruption that nearly made her kill her mother and bed her father. She had been saved and the others never really held her responsible for what she did then but… she remembered and she knew that darkness was still here.

"You won't be," said Hotaru, hugging her friend. "Nemesis was evil because Wiseman corrupted it. I won't let it happen again."

She took a kind of apparatus on her nightstand and quickly manipulated some controls, displaying holograms. She stopped on one where an older Saturn stood with a slender woman with grey hair. The woman had a playful smirk and was making a golden coin spin on the tip of her right forefinger.

"This is my old friend Tyche," said Hotaru. "She was Sailor Nemesis."

_- George Washington University Hospital, 6 April 1981 -_

"Mister President," said a greying man with patch on his left eye.

He thought that the President didn't look too bad for someone who had taken a bullet in a lung a few days ago. There was however a question. Why did he send the Secret service to fetch a retired veteran like him while he was still in the hospital?

"Please sit down, Mister Scott," said the President, pointing to the chair near the bed. "We have to talk about the real reason why I took a bullet. This reason falls in your area of expertise."

Clive Scott frowned. Usually, the President was kept blissfully unaware of certain realities.

"Shortly after I took office, Henry told me about you and the kind of things the DRI fought during World War Two. He told about what you found when you raided that SS castle. When I started to dig… some people didn't like it. I'm not sure who did it. Maybe some people in my administration who want to exploit the leftovers of the DRI or another faction, but I have reasons to believe that my assassin's madness was artificial. Given that I'm still alive, it was probably done to scare me. Well… I'm not an easy man to scare. I'm giving you full powers to create an agency to take care of the paranormal."

"There are many ways to interpret this mission, Mister President."

"I see that Henry was right when he told me you were using your mind. I know that I cannot make things public, but my intent is that any… non-human sentient American that just wants to live in peace will be protected by your agency just as the FBI would for… regular people. I know that others cannot be reasoned with and will have to be dealt with like rabid beasts but I want you to make the distinction, to handle things with decency."

"I understand. This means I will have to recruit… unusual people."

"Full powers, Mister Scott. We need this… Bureau of Metahuman Affairs."

_- Elsewhere, 27 hours later -_

_Where am I?_

Usagi woke up, looking around. This wasn't the room where Sailor Saturn had tucked her to bed in Castle Titan. The architectural style was very different, different from the one she had come to associate with the Silver Millennium. It was much more… human-sized than the huge halls of the planetary castles. Also, the intricate decorations in the room reminded her of what she had seen in school about classical India. There were even some inscriptions in something that resembled Sanskrit characters.

She got up, draping the black silken sheets around her naked body but suddenly stopped. Something was wrong. She looked for a mirror, finally finding one and sighed.

"I should have known…"

She left the sheet fall, taking in fully the changes in her body. It was disturbingly familiar to her. One of the ways Wiseman had found to tempt and corrupt her had been to play on the condition that made her body stay childish despite an age measured in centuries. When she absorbed Nemesis' Black Crystal, she obtained the body of her dreams, the body of a femme fatale.

_The body I'm seeing in the mirror right now…_

Not wanting to delve too much on the problem, she looked around and found clothes that had obviously been left at her attention. The style was again roughly Indian, though the tiger stripes also reminded her of the clothes worn by Lum and the other Oni in Urusei Yatsura.

"May I come in?" said a voice from outside the room.

Usagi frowned. The voice resembled Hotaru's but had a strange modulation. She went to the door and opened, revealing a kind of chibi version of Sailor Saturn.

"You're the Guardian Spirit of Castle Titan, right?"

"That's one way to put it," replied the 'child'. "The Queen told me to bring you to her. She is in the War Room."

"The Queen? You mean that my grand…"

"No, you're still on Saturn, so I'm speaking of my Mistress Kali, of course."

"Kali… like the Hindu goddess?"

"Yep. From what I observed about Terra in the last twelve millennia, the kings and queens of the planetary realms became worshipped as gods and goddesses. Think about it: your grandmother Selene is the goddess of the Moon in Greek mythology. Kali is the name of my Queen's first incarnation, long before she was reborn as Hotaru Tomoe."

"Okay… are we still in Castle Titan?"

"No. For reasons she will explain, her Majesty moved you to Sanaiscara, the capitol city of Saturn's kingdom. Normally, the place would float in the upper atmosphere, with a clear sight on the rings, but it lowered itself in secure position after the last of the Raksha left for Terra."

The Guardian led her through the halls, finally pushing the doors of a big room where Hotaru was busy manipulating what looked like interactive holograms. Just like her, Sailor Saturn looked older, maybe eighteen.

"I think I need a lot of explanations, Hotaru."

"True… What do you want to know?"

"Let's start with why we're here and not in Castle Titan?"

"Taking a shortcut when space folding is risky. In our case, my jump to bring us faster to Castle Titan made me… imprecise regarding the time of our arrival. To be blunt, we're the sixth of April 1981. I therefore had to get us in a… private place."

"Almost four years before the battle with Galaxia…"

Usagi immediately thought about her mother who died using the last of her energy not only to reincarnate all the other Senshi once again, but also to repair all what she could of the worlds devastated by Galaxia, probably reshaping a good part of the galaxy in the process. Maybe she could…

"I know what you're thinking," said Hotaru, deciphering her friend's expression. "Destroying the Death Busters and saving 'younger me' from Mistress Nine is very tempting… but we have no guarantee that this will allow them to go through the next battles more easily than we did. More than all, we cannot guess Pluto's reaction."

"But she… if we explain things to her…"

"If she was fully awakened, I would contact her right away. This kind of temporal mess happened quite a few times back in the old days. But she is a mere shadow of herself right now… I guess it's time I tell you about your grandmother and what really happened in the Silver Millennium…"

_- Washington, almost at the same time -_

"Thank you for receiving me so quickly, Richard," said Scott.

Richard Tideman was an old friend from the time of the DRI, and his brother-in-law. Since the war, he had founded a company – Tideman Industries – that was now a major defense contractor, their last big contract being the construction of the supercarriers like the USS Nimitz.

"So, what made you leave your retreat in the Montana, Clive?"

"The President asked to reopen the DRI and, that's his words, to transform it into the Bureau of Metahuman Affairs."

"A name with a nice 'Superman' ring… I suppose he has reasons to think the attempt came from our old 'area of expertise'"

"Not so old according to a report from the Navy I saw…"

Tideman smiled innocently. They both had excellent reasons to know why, a few months ago, the Nimitz completely disappeared from the surface of the Pacific Ocean for a few days. It was following the 'other end' of this event that, in December 1941, Scott had helped a 'displaced' Richard Owens to become Richard Tideman. He could not refuse anything to the man who saved his sister.

"Did your people make any progress on discovering why this happened?" asked Clive.

"Not really. The recorders that were hidden in the Nimitz gave us new data, but nothing conclusive. My people think the phenomenon is a kind of ripple going both ways through time following a very big event that may not even happen on Earth. Like if someone was trying to fix up things, messed up and corrected again. I suppose you're interested in my 'Special Projects' unit, right?"

"You have been working on such matters for thirty years and never abused what you learnt. Others are not so… prudent."

"Well, once bitten… I don't see why Tideman Industries could not become the main contractor to provide your Bureau with equipment. Don't expect me to dress like a bat, though. Also, Laurel would kill me if I behaved like him."

_- Saturn, some hours later -_

Usagi was feeling truly miserable as she raised her head from the toilet bowl. Thankfully, there had been one of those next to the War Room where Hotaru had shown her all those archive movies to make sure her point went through.

It had all started with the initial Youma invasion, an event that happened roughly twenty six thousand years ago and wiped out the old world. The survivors gathered in a fortress called Hyperborea, had finally managed to regroup and defeat them. At first, Usagi had thought it was by creating the first Sailor Senshi but she had soon understood that it had gone a lot further than that. The Senshi had effectively been created, but at the same time the people from Hyperborea changed themselves, becoming something more than human, something that could fight Youma and that mythology called by many names, names like Deva and Asura. After the war, they left Earth to recover, erasing all traces of the old civilization apart from a surveillance station on an artificial island near the Azores that would become the Earth Kingdom, Atlantis for Plato.

They then settled on the other planets. Contrarily to what she had been led to believe so far, the different kingdoms weren't vassals of the Moon Kingdom, but formed a Confederacy, each planet evolving into its own civilization. There were the fierce warriors of Saturn, guardians of the peace, the mysterious scientists of Pluto, delving deep in the mysteries of time, the hedonists of Venus and so on. The Confederacy suffered from attacks but it always managed to recover, in part thanks to the adaptability provided by its 'Chaotic' nations: Saturn, Nemesis, the League of the Great Asteroid Belt and, to some extent, Venus.

It wasn't always easy and the different nations were almost always squabbling for one thing or another. From Hotaru's viewpoint, this tension was fundamental as it kept things from becoming too humdrum. The Youma made other attempts but the Confederacy prevailed, even if it suffered many losses. This was how Kali – Hotaru's Silver Millennium incarnation – had lost her husband Shiva and her daughter Nirrti.

However, one of the monarchs was not content with this state of things. The Lunarians were orderly people and had often stated that a centralized state could do better. Selene had the Silver Crystal created, a weapon that would allow her to reshape reality according to her desire. She first crippled the Belt League when she imprisoned Nehellenia in the Mirror World. Nemesis and Saturn were next on her list, because she knew she wouldn't be able to 'make them see reason', in other words to control them to do what she believed to be right.

"Feeling better?" asked Hotaru's voice from the hall.

"My life is a lie!"

"I suppose you know the saying about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. Selene wasn't evil like our adversaries were and… that makes her all the most horrifying. She believed that what she was doing was right, that she would bring peace and happiness to everybody. People built for Chaos and War like me had no place in her utopia, so we had to be removed. The Nemesians chose to go out in a blaze of glory, which finally led Ishtar – Sailor Venus – to kill Tyche in duel. I chose to survive and what little was left of my people joined me in coldsleep, waiting for better times."

"Why were you so sure everything would go to hell?"

"When I saw a little of Crystal Tokyo, I wondered why the Senshi of that time needed us. They were supposed to be older, more experienced and powerful version of ourselves. Later, as I walked through the city, I could not get rid of my uneasiness. I didn't understand back then but now, I know why Crystal Tokyo must not exist."

"But it's… a world without crime and murder."

"It's a hospice for a dying civilization, Usagi. In the world of Crystal Tokyo, people didn't hope, didn't dream. They were content and wasted away, losing their will to live. Humanity is made to look forward, to rise to the challenge. Sure, it often hurts, but without that struggle, everything becomes pointless. Crystal Tokyo as well as the Silver Millennium… it's like when you tame a wild animal, making it unable to survive outside of its cage."

"Then, the Black Moon Clan?"

"They said it themselves: they were disappointed by Crystal Tokyo, by that gilded cage. Their problem is that they fell on Wiseman who used them for his nihilistic goals. Back in the Silver Millennium, others did the same, mainly the Belters. They left for other star systems, founding worlds like Kinmoku and creating their own Senshi. A few millennia later, they even in some cases established diplomatic relations with the Moon Kingdom, sending ambassadors whose children were sometimes made part of your mother's entourage."

"You're talking about Artemis and Luna, right?"

"Yes. Finally Metallia arrived and the Kingdom was this time unable to fight the Youma. It fell and a few of the survivors managed to settle on Earth. I should have awakened at that moment but I was taken in Selene's reincarnation spell. Another good intention that got twisted. Because Selene wanted us to have innocent lives, we were reincarnated as mere shadows of ourselves… until Pluto understood and freed me."

"So… what do we do now? We wait here for these four years to pass?"

"No. I need to understand the world if I am to change it and you need training to use Nemesis' powers."

"We'll need money… and identities," said Usagi as she went out of the toilets.

"The first is not a problem. My kingdom's treasury is still mostly intact… let's say I'm more concerned about wrecking gold market prices than lacking in funds. As for identities, I'm not as good as Pluto at that little game, but I already had to do that kind of things… in the distant past."

_- Paris, 27 May 1981 -_

Usagi listened with attention as Hotaru ordered their dinner in perfect French. Thanks to the disguise pen, they both looked older than they really were, rather like twenty-something students than their current teenage selves. The disguise also served to hide their most remarkable traits, like Hotaru's scarlet eyes or Usagi's pink hair.

"This translation spell is kind of scary, Hotaru," said Usagi in Japanese.

"One of Sarasvati's best ones," replied Sailor Saturn, using Sailor Mercury's 'old name'. "Not only can we understand perfectly both spoken and written version of the language once we have enough of a comparison basis, but we learn it at the same time. The only defect is the strain. It's a little tiring for us, but it would cause brain damage in humans."

They had been starting their training trip on Earth since a month, after a few weeks of training on Saturn. They were currently in a small restaurant near the Sorbonne, easily losing themselves among the crowd of students in the neighborhood. They had been here for the two last weeks, meeting various people from the French Communist Party. Hotaru's interest in 'Red things' had started shortly after they acquired forged identities from the Hong Kong Triads.

_It was so easy for her to deal with those criminals… _

"You look thoughtful."

"I was thinking about Hong Kong… and how easy it was for you to... I almost thought you have been a Yakuza in another life."

"This is not the best place to speak about this but, it should do no harm if we speak Svargan," she said, having shifted to something resembling Sanskrit. "When I was younger, I did a lot of… stupid things and got finally arrested. As my country was going to war, some people thought my talents could serve in a special unit, the kind that… was expendable. I decided to prove them wrong. I forged that unit, the Tiger Guard, into the sharpest blade of Svarga's armies. However, this had a side-effect that did not really please the high-ups. The Guard was loyal to me, not to the country."

Usagi looked at her glass of red wine and drank it straight. Intellectually, she knew that the persons the Senshi had been during the Silver Millennium could be really different from the ones they had grown to be in their recent incarnation. But Hotaru as a Yakuza boss turned elite soldier was too much for her. As their dishes arrived, she was quite happy to concentrate on the food. However, she could only notice that Hotaru was eating a steak tartare, probably to soothe her bloodlust.

"You know, Usagi… in Shintoism, kami have two souls, one gentle and one assertive. I'm like that. The Hotaru you knew in Japan is my 'Parvati' side. She's nice and shy. She dislikes fighting but does it because she wouldn't forgive herself if someone was hurt when she could have done something. The one you're seeing now is 'Kali', the lady of war forged by countless battles."

"I miss the old Hotaru…"

"We're the same person in the end, Usagi. Kali learnt some harsh lessons Parvati was spared from… I promise that you will see her again, that I will be able to be 'Parvati' again. But, right now, I need Kali, because she knows what to do."

"Are the other Senshi like this too? Are their old selves so different from the ones I know?"

"For some things, yes. Believe it or not but Minako was a brilliant astrophysicist in her first life."

"You're right I don't believe it," said Usagi, remembering the difficulties of Sailor Venus with her grades. "I'm not going to buy she's as brilliant as Ami."

"Never said that. Minako may look dumb but it's rather a matter of lack of motivation than of intelligence. In her old life, she was Ami's best friend and Ami gave her the motivation to become a good scientist, even if she wasn't a genius. It went both ways as Minako managed to tear Ami from her books and have some social life."

"And Mom?"

"Her case is different. Ami, Minako and I are all from the first generation, the one of the founders of the planetary realms, the same as your grandmother Selene. Setsuna, Haruka and Michiru are from that generation too but we met later. Rei, Makoto and your mother are younger. There were also others you were never told about. Among other things, there were men," she said with a smile.

Hotaru took a pill from a small box and let it fall in her glass of water. It dissolved almost instantly, coloring the water scarlet. She took a sip, grimacing a little like one did when he drank some foul tasting medicine.

"Can't you… I don't know, go to a butcher shop and have some real stuff?"

"I will probably have to as it's tasting worse every time… well one can't expect dried rations to taste great."

They finished their meal, discussing of lighter things and paid. As they walked back to their hotel in the warm evening, Hotaru suddenly stiffened.

"What?"

"Blood… human blood has been shed."

_- Not very far away, at the same time -_

Miriam Vance was almost praying for her mind to go numb, but the searing pain coming from her leg was making her notice the inhuman face of her aggressor all too vividly. She had heard stories that students had disappeared in the last weeks but did not really believe them. Now, she could see the ridges on the monster's brow, the fangs and the yellow eyes. She felt his breath, stinking of blood and decay as he aimed for her throat. She screamed as her skin was pierced and blood left her body in a sickening sucking noise. She knew that another of those monsters, a woman this time, was around, looking at the scene with the same soulless eyes, a sadistic grin on her lips.

Suddenly, the monster was ripped away from her, thrown against the opposite wall by… She had sometimes fantasized about being ravished by a romantic vampire, a fantasy that her aggressor had thoroughly destroyed. But the woman that had just thrown the vampire away was… everything a vampire should be. She was elegant and aristocratic, maybe Asian given her features. She had a petite frame that made her look a little like a porcelain doll, particularly with that frilly black and purple dress that seemed to come straight from the Old South. Despite that, she exuded power. Her pale skin was perfect, ethereal and her face looked kind despite the scarlet fire in her eyes.

_She's beautiful… she looks at the other vampires… like the plantation beauty disgusted by the misconduct of riffraff..._

"Bite on this," said the noble vampiress while she gave her a leather glove. "I have to set your knee back."

Miriam nodded, not daring to disobey her, but stared as the male vampire got up and charged her savior. Turning slightly, the Asian vampiress moved her right hand faster than a cobra, her index touching the brow of the monster. Miriam could only wonder if she was completely hallucinating as the vampire suddenly seemed to move in slow motion while purple rings gravitated around him, taking him away as they lifted him from the ground. The vampiress closed her hand in a swift move and the rings contracted with a flash, leaving only a pellet that fell very heavily on the ground.

"You… you cannot exist," said the vampire's companion. "Purebloods are a fuckin' myth!"

"Fortuna," said the vampiress, "can you be a dear and subdue this piece of trash. She may have interesting things to say to us."

"Of course," said a woman with long pink hair in a strange twin ponytail and a rather risqué black dress.

Miriam bit the glove, hard as the Asian vampiress set her dislocated knee back. She felt something warm emanating from the hand of the woman, a deep purple glow that dulled the pain.

"That's what I feared. You're going into shock," said the vampiress. "I will give you a little of my blood. Not enough to turn you, but enough to save your life and help you to heal."

Miriam nodded slowly. She was studying biology and knew the symptoms and consequences. She had to stay conscious. Suddenly, she felt the vampiress' wrist pushed against her lips, and the rich fragrance of her blood coming from a small wound.

"Drink."

Miriam took a sip, not daring to disobey that voice. The warmth of the blood seeped through her and she felt good, protected. Too soon to her taste, the vampiress removed her wrist and she fell asleep against her dark savior, her heart beating peacefully.

Usagi smiled as she looked at Hotaru. Now she was sure that her friend was still here. The way she had helped this woman, not even thinking about the risks… She was just… an adult Hotaru, sure of herself and her powers. A Hotaru that had learnt the price of battle and knew better than to hesitate to annihilate her enemies yet also knew when to show kindness.

_And a Sailor Saturn that can use all of her powers without transforming, with an absolute control on them… Note that neither do I need to transform anymore._

"Where did you put her?" asked Hotaru.

"Here," replied Usagi, flipping a copper coin whose 'heads' face sported the screaming visage of a female vampire.

"I see that my lessons on Tyche's tricks were not lost…"

"What do we do with your damsel in distress?"

"Can you check her purse? We bring her back to her home, tuck her in bed and she'll probably believe it was a nightmare."

"Okay let's see if I'm lucky… got it."

Usagi took out a city plan and quickly compared the address to it.

"Looks like it's only a kilometer or so from here. Roof-hopping?"

"Yep."

The two Senshi jumped, reaching a nearby roof in one smooth jump. They quickly found the place.

"No alarm I can detect," said Usagi as she pocketed her compact. "You can change into mist?"

"Nope and I would do too much damage teleporting."

"Well, I'm not Cat's Eye, but I used to fiddle with locks in the palace…"

Hotaru stifled a giggle. Because of their time jump, Japan's most famous trio of cat burglars would not start their operations for two years but Hotaru remembered the time she had spent with Usagi Jr., looking for clues in the news. Her adoptive parents had… mixed reactions on the subject. Haruka-papa was mostly impressed by the stunts they organized, making Shinjuku's police look like utter fools while Michiru-mama was usually raising an eyebrow in that 'what kind of example do you believe you're giving to our daughter?' way.

_And Setsuna-mama, as usual, had that little smile indicating that she knew but couldn't or wouldn't tell…_

The window soon opened and they entered silently, soon undressing the young woman and tucking her in bed.

"Will her leg be okay?" whispered Usagi.

"Yes. She will be ravenous when she wakes up, but my blood will otherwise repair the damage."

They left and Hotaru fiddled immediately with the disguise pen, removing the illusion of the old-fashioned dress to appear in a style that reminded Usagi of Haruka's casual mixed with Saturn's colors: black slacks, purple turtleneck and black aviator leather jacket.

"I swear… Minako made some very bizarre presets on this thing," said Hotaru.

"I know we… or rather you cannot use your Senshi transformation but can't Pluto detect what you did?"

"No. The mass of data is already huge and with her reduced capacities, Setsuna-mama has to concentrate on specific factors, like the Sailor costumes. To be sure, I used override codes Pluto has forgotten to order the Castles' Network to blind the Gates of Time on things like our magical signatures. As long as we stay within the parameters I set, the risk is very low."

_And now that was a very Kali moment, _thought Usagi_… that habit to plan things like a military campaign._

"Okay… before I take the skank out of the coin, I thought vampires were like you. Are they a different kind?"

"You remember what I told you about us being only a handful when Selene did her coup? A Youma that goes by the pompous name of the First Evil managed to corrupt one of the major vampire clans, the Turok-Han. We destroyed them but were greatly diminished in that war."

"That's when Shiva died?"

"Yes. He sealed the First Evil in a place that is currently near Los Angeles. In a way, he is still alive, as his essence is what makes the seal. Nirrti and I… had words after that. She left on a quest to resurrect her father and I never saw her again. The point is that I think that we missed some of the traitors and these degenerate mutants are their descendants. After the fall of the Earth Kingdom, there was probably little to prevent them from pullulating."

"From what Guardian Saturn said the last – I will say Raksha to prevent confusion – left for Earth. There may still be some of your people around."

"Maybe the skank will know something. Well, I heard many stories about the quarries under Paris. Do you think we could use one for a nice interrogation?"

"I don't see why not. Concerning that girl… she doesn't risk to suddenly turn into a Raksha, with you being the Dark Mother and all?"

"If she stays away from magic, she will live a normal life. Maybe she will age a little slower than an 'untainted' human and like her meat a little rarer, but that's all."

"And if she doesn't?"

"Then I will feel it and I'll teach my new daughter how to walk the night. Now," she said, taking her map of Paris out of her jacket, "where was that entry…"

_- Paris, 28 May 1981 -_

"Mr. Giles, I'm happy to see you."

"I came as soon as I could, Jacques. What do we have?" asked the Senior Watcher Sir Percival Giles.

"It seems to have started in one of the quarries below the town. Vampires have been using that labyrinth for ages and you know where some lead to."

"That old demon temple… Aymerich is still there?" asked the Englishman, naming the Master of Paris vampires.

"No. As far as we know, he's dusted. There is a trail of destruction going from that quarry all the way to the temple. As for the temple… it's better you see it. This picture was taken by people from the 'Inspection des Carrières' who are in the know."

He took out a picture. Giles blinked. He had already seen some drawings of the old temple but never a photo… and now he knew he never would. The tormented sculptures of the place sometimes called the Inverted Cathedral were gone. All that was left was a perfectly spherical empty space whose walls looked like purplish obsidian.

"I had some analyses done. Physically, this 'rock' has a density three times the one of lead. Magically, it's pulsating with an unknown, but fading energy."

"The sphere is what, thirty yards in diameter?"

"Thirty three."

"Do we know who did it?"

"At first, before I saw that picture, I wondered if someone sent the Slayer here without telling me anything. The first witness spoke of a super-strong teenage girl moving like quicksilver and killing everything in her path with a kind of halberd. She was accompanied by a pink-haired witch with a black moon crescent tattooed on her brow."

"Punk witches… o tempora o mores… The Slayer is not in Europe so, what did the other witnesses tell?"

"If we didn't have the results in picture… I would have disbelieved the tale. Spells like that have never been seen. One witness told something interesting about the 'Slayer'. She had vampire fangs, but no brow ridges and scarlet eyes instead of yellow ones."

Percival started to clean his glasses.

"Jacques, have you ever heard about Noble Vampires?"

The French Watcher frowned. Noble Vampires, sometimes called Purebloods, were a myth. They were a superior breed of vampires with terrifying powers and none of the traditional weaknesses. At various points in history, some vampires had tried to make other demons believe they were one of those but failed. The myth said that the last of those vampires had disappeared with the fall of Carthage.

"Our colleagues in the Far East have reasons to believe that one clan is hiding among the Japanese Yokai," continued the Englishman. "But given our relationships with the local authorities…"

"It has been impossible to verify."

Japan was one of those places where the Demonic community and the human authorities had come to an understanding and managed to ignore each other. The Yokai made their own police, exterminating ruthlessly demons that attacked humans and the humans were discouraged to look too much into things. An indirect consequence was that the Watchers' Council was not welcome in the Land of the Rising Sun. Things were only slightly less difficult in China and the other nations of the Far East.

"What do we do then?" asked the French Watcher.

"Unless she manifests again, nothing."

_- In an Aeroflot flight on the way to Moscow, at the same time -_

"Didn't we go a little overboard?" asked Usagi in Svargan.

"Maybe a little," said Hotaru. "But that was sooo satisfying."

"Why did you tell me to spare some of the Youma?"

"There are many kind of Youma and some just want to live in peace on the outskirts of human society, like some Yokai in the stories in Japan."

"But not the Turok vampires?"

"They only know their hunger and their lust, without any trace of conscience. They're rabid beasts and have to be put down before they can hurt more. I'll have to look for a more global solution later."

"On another matter, you think things will go smoothly in Moscow?"

"I chose to meet these people in Paris because they were intelligent enough to recognize the facts and had the ear of the Soviet Ambassador… who has himself worked for several years in the State Planning Committee."

Usagi nodded. The ambassador had listened to Hotaru's plan because it provided solutions that were ideologically acceptable. He had arranged them a meeting with some of the high-ups of the Gosplan. She massaged her temple. This mission to save the USSR from economic collapse was also for her a crash-course on the probability altering part of Nemesis' powers.

"Why is this mission so important?"

"Just like in the old times of the Confederacy, it's a question of balance. It may seem strange, but the sole superpower situation is a lot less stable than a world with two political poles. Typically, a small fanatic movement is a lot more likely to use a nuclear warhead than a superpower. If the USSR collapses, someone pawning their arsenal to such a movement becomes a real concern. Thankfully, the analyses mini-me ran about their economy are sufficiently similar to problems one of the Old World nations had, so I know what solutions will work… and stay ideologically acceptable for them."

"By Old World, you mean antediluvian, right?"

"Right, a place called Gladsheimr. A mix of Russia and Germany's history as a revolution took out the old corrupt monarchy and replaced it with a dictatorship that had similar ideas regarding economy. They renamed the country Thule and finally went to war with Svarga. We kicked their ass and annexed them. Later, their descendants settled on Jupiter and restored the pre-revolution culture."

"I think we need to ask something in exchange to make our story more believable."

"I suppose you have an idea," said Hotaru, smiling to see her friend starting to participate actively in the plan.

"Proton rockets are a little rugged, but reliable. We will need them for what we have in mind."

_- Somewhere near La Jolla, California February 1985 -_

Clive Scott was looking at the large Californian house that had become the home of a family of Japanese expatriate very recently. Officially, they were only rich people who decided for a change of scenery, but the Bureau of Metahuman Affairs had been keeping tabs on the three Kisugi sisters and their entourage.

_After all, I know their father…_

A thing that not many people knew was that the sisters' father was a German painter called Michael Heinz who fled the country during the 1930's because his art was not Germanic enough for the taste of the new Chancellor. During the War, Michael Heinz had sometimes collaborated with the Demon Research Initiative to oppose Himmler's 'antiquities collectors'. Heinz had become a good friend and they had often corresponded when he settled in Japan and married someone from there.

He rang. He still needed a West Coast director for the BMA and Rui Kisugi, the eldest of the sisters, was very high on his list because of her intellect and planning abilities. The fact she was, like her sisters, a probable Slayer Potential was an interesting bonus.

_- Tokyo, February 1985 -_

Saeko Mizuno was crying. She was thinking about all that she would have liked to share with her daughter. For too long, she had consecrated her life to her medical career, neglecting Ami. Now it was too late. Her daughter was dead, lost to a mindless terrorist attack with most of her friends. Now, all that was left to her was grief and a little tombstone in that graveyard.

"Mizuno-san?"

"Who… who are you?"

She rose, facing a young woman wearing an expensive purple pantsuit that was probably better suited to a meeting with corporate representatives than to walking in a graveyard.

"Ami may have told you about me. My name is Hotaru Tomoe."

Saeko frowned. From what Ami had told her, she would have expected someone younger than a woman that was maybe twenty. She also remembered reading about that name in her professional journal, in relation to a new company called Apex Industries that recently patented a method for nerve regeneration using stem cells.

"I… sorry, the Hotaru Ami told about…"

"I know, I'm supposed to be younger. It's a rather complicated story but everything revolves around a thing you probably believe to be an urban legend: the Sailor Senshi."

The doctor paled. She knew that most people believed them to be a myth. A lot of people in Juuban, like her, were on the contrary trying very hard to forget having witnessed a monster attack. Suddenly, Ami's unexplained absences made a lot more sense.

"No!" said Saeko while she clung to Hotaru's jacket. "Those terrorists?"

"I am sorry for that masquerade, but it had to be done to give the families of the Sailor Senshi closure. Ami was Sailor Mercury. She fought bravely, but she fell in a faraway place."

"Then… why are you telling me this? Why do you torture me?"

"Because you have something the others don't. Because I can offer you something I cannot give to the Tsukino or the Aino, not without making them pay a price neither Minako nor Usagi would forgive me for."

"What can you offer? Can you give me Ami back?"

"Usagi used the last of her power to reincarnate the Senshi. They will come back, but it may be in decades. What I can give you is what I have: the possibility to retain your youth as long as you want."

"How?"

"Your pregnancy was difficult and you were very near to lose her. Because of this, some of Ami's blood – Mercurian blood – ended in your system. I can finalize the mutation process. I can make you a Vidyadhara."

"This sounds like something out of the Vedas… Don't they have another name?"

"Yes. Here in Japan, Vidyadhara are well known. You call them Yuki Onna."

_- Minato Ward, Tokyo, October 1987 -_

"Why do it here of all places?"

Hotaru raised her eyes from the schematics she was studying and looked at Usagi. She took a hardhat on the table and invited her friend to follow her.

"Why not? It's ideally placed for our corporate headquarters and the terrain belongs to us already."

Usagi rolled her eyes.

"You know exactly what I mean."

"As I suppose you're referring to the facts it's the former location of the Tomoe Research Center…"

"Also known as Death Buster Central…"

"That's one more reason, actually. I prefer by far to find anything my father could have hidden here rather than have someone else do it."

"I suppose that the bid to rehabilitate the terrain made by Wolfram and Hart to City Hall convinced you to make haste… Fair enough I suppose."

They were arriving to a lift. A foreman opened the door for his bosses, asking himself why they were speaking in that language. He didn't really care though. Even if it was unusual for a Japanese corporation to be run by two young women, Apex was a successful company and treated employees like family, even if they weren't Japanese. It was very important for an Indian immigrant like him. So if his bosses wanted to speak in what looked like an archaic form of Sanskrit, it was their absolute right.

"Speaking of City Hall, I have dealt with the last oppositions against the submarine part of the project. The Ecologists are satisfied with our guarantees."

"Good."

They were now on the top of the structure. The hexagonal pyramid that would be the Apex Arcology was already rousing a lot of curiosity around the world. In the last two years, the young women now called Hotaru and Usagi Tomoe had merged the corporate assets of the late Sailor Senshi with the empire they had built in the shadows, turning it into a whole new keireitsu with interests in most of the world. Saturn was an expert in warfare, and economy was just another battlefield to her…

Usagi had fully participated to the growth of the company. Like Hotaru, she had shed the last remnants of her childhood and a good part of her innocence. She had learnt to be merciless when she needed it, because, sometimes, people had to be sacrificed for the greater good. She often wondered what her mother would think when she would see their work after her reincarnation. Would she understand what they did and the price they paid?

"By the way, did the Americans make difficulties for our last takeover?" asked Hotaru.

"Yes and no. We acquired what we wanted in Seattle, but Wolfram and Hart is seriously getting on my nerves. I'm certain they're helping anti-Japanese lobbying in Washington, saying we're basically buying the country and…"

"It's not completely wrong. They are so eager to sell it… But, as we both know, that particular law firm is more than a nuisance."

"I will be more than happy when we will be ready to crush them. On your side, how did your trip to the sunny islands go? Not too much water for your vampiric taste?"

Hotaru laughed. Usagi often teased her on the vulnerabilities of her species. Pureblood vampires didn't have most of the defects of their western counterparts. They didn't burn in sunlight, need an invitation to enter a house or fear holy objects. They were also living beings, not soulless walking corpses. After all, they were the originals, not pale copies made for mass production. They had a weakness the copy didn't have though, one that had to do with their ability to use their innate magic to augment their physical power. Water basically "short-circuited" them.

"Saltwater is not so bad with a few barrier spells. Otherwise, Kiribati's government is ours. They don't really understand why we're investing there, but don't care. Our plan will make their islands a wealthy state."

"The Watcher's Council?"

"I was… watched of course, but they checked if I could find magical artifacts in the area. Like most supernatural factions, they think the laws of physics don't concern them…"

Usagi took easily the reference. One thing she had learnt working with Saturn, building Apex Industries, was that the universe was a whole and everything was interconnected. Organizations like the Watcher's Council almost forgot that the "mundane" world existed. That made them vulnerable to organizations that were able to see the big picture, like Apex, and, to Usagi's irritation, Wolfram and Hart.

"Why can't they see why we're acquiring acres of reef in the Pacific, right on the Equator and the neighboring islands? It's evident even if you have only the basics in astronautics. So, what will we call the city that will rise on the sea? New Atlantis?"

"I was thinking of Babel," said Hotaru, thinking of the reason they would build it at that precise latitude.

- _Los Angeles, January 19__th__ 1997-_

Joyce Summers was breathing, using every trick in the exercises she had practiced during the last months, and only breaking her concentration to follow the orders of her doctor. Finally, she felt it was done and a small cry confirmed it. Soon, the nurse gave her two little bundles.

"Elisabeth," she said, kissing the brow of the eldest of her twins. "Dawn," she added, kissing the second one. "Hank?"

"I can see them Joyce," said a voice coming from a loudspeaker while the face of Hank Summers smiled on the large screen occupying a wall. "A pity I could not come back in time."

"At least you could see it all by vidphone."

He nodded, still smiling. He had not been able to cancel this business trip and was currently in Sydney. Suddenly, a wild chorus of cheers rose from the large office space behind him.

"Sorry dear… the guys here are following the landing."

"I suppose it was the same in 69. Nurse, can you…"

"Of course."

The nurse manipulated some controls and a window opened on the screen, showing a spaceship landing on a reddish-brown, rocky soil. She knew that this actually happened almost half an hour ago, despite being transmitted in direct. It was just a matter of distance and the limit posed by the speed of light. The flag of the East Pacific Alliance, the nation recently formed by Japan, Australia and most islands in-between, was painted on the hull alongside the ones of the USA, the European Union and the USSR.

"Look my darlings," said Joyce as a woman in a spacesuit exited the spaceship. "We made it to Mars."


	2. The Times They Are A-Changin' (Part I)

_Author note: and here is the second chapter of this reboot. I hope you will enjoy it. _

_Please do not hesitate to tell me what you think about it. _

_- Los Angeles, 19 Jan 1997-_

"Doctor, is everything all right?" asked Joyce as she saw her pediatrician enter her room while scratching his head.

Her babies had gone for a postnatal exam. It was pure routine and also allowed the nurses to clean them. A smiling nurse followed, pushing a crib with her sleeping daughters.

"I can reassure you, Mrs. Summers, this is nothing to worry about, but Dawn seems to have the Genetic Expression Syndrome."

Joyce frowned then remembered. It was something that had officially started during an interview of the world's most famous pinkette in 1987. When Usagi Tomoe had been asked if she was making a fashion statement with her hair, she had simply replied that it was her natural color. Some reporters had started to look and discovered that this strange cousin of albinism had known cases since 1945. They had been, however, too few and away from each other to be considered anything else than an aberration, until some scientists interrogated by the reporters decided to publish a compiled study, naming it Genetic Expression Syndrome, GES for short. It was then that they realized one thing: the number of babies born with the GES was growing and there were now far too many to disregard the phenomenon.

"How?"

"We don't know. All we can say is that the GES now touches one newborn out of one hundred thousand and that the percentage is growing slightly over the years. Everything else is pure speculation."

Joyce remembered seeing a subject on the TV about what some people believed them to be. Mutants, children of Satan, alien half-breeds, freaks, all of that had been said. That was a lot for people whose sole difference was a funny hair or eye color.

She took Dawn in her arms. It was true that shortly after her birth, the little tuft of hair on her head had looked black but now that it was dry and clean, it was easy to see its true color: dark emerald green. It was certainly exotic, but it suited her. She opened her eyes, looking curiously at her mother. They were the color of amethysts.

"Well, you're going to be quite the looker, aren't you?"

Elisabeth, that her father had already started to nickname Buffy, had more common colors. Blonde hair and blue eyes were not very common in her family, but that had been the case for one of Buffy's great-grandmothers.

Having fed her babies, she put them back in the crib and switched on her room's TV, the doctor and the nurse having left for now. The anchorman announced that Dave Kowalski, one of the channel's top reporters who claimed to always be 'where the news are made' was in direct. The reporter appeared soon. He was a rugged man in his forties, often reminding Joyce of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones. This time, he was in a room with a modern, but rather utilitarian design and next to him stood the tall figure of Usagi Tomoe.

"Here is Dave Kowalski," started the man as the blinds behind the pair started to rise. "I am at the Apex Command Center with Usagi Tomoe."

Joyce smiled. She knew where the interview was taking place and Kowalski was, indeed, up to his reputation. Beyond the glass bay were a plain of gray dust and gray mountains under a black, starry sky. One could have guessed only by looking at this sky. Even in the deepest of deserts, the stars didn't have that clarity. For those paying less attention to detail, an object in the sky cleared any doubt on the location. An almost full Earth was shining in the starry sky.

"Ms. Tomoe, thank you for receiving me here, in Serenity City."

Joyce knew like most people that the space race had resumed with a vengeance in 1988, the year Apex made its entrance on the space scene. It had all started with the inaugural flight of a new jet that had been developed in almost total secrecy. There had been hints of course. Some had wondered why Apex had signed a contract of development and maintenance with the Australian government regarding the Woomera Test Range, after a budget cut forced the USAF to discontinue their activities on and near the site in 1984.

In March 1988, a plane that looked like a single delta wing and carried a payload similar to the one of a medium-sized airliner took off from Woomera and flew to the Hokkaido Apex facility in three hours, with a top speed of Mach 7.2 and a trajectory culminating at an altitude of 120 km. A week later, during the return trip, the plane climbed to 250 km and put a satellite in orbit. Almost at the same time, Qantas and the JAL ordered each six of the shuttles geared for passenger transport, at a price similar to the one of a modern airliner.

Of course, many experts wanted to know how this was possible. They discovered that the Apex engineers had solved the problems of several revolutionary technologies, like the pulse detonation engines that propelled the Wayfarer shuttle. It wasn't actually that difficult but, as often, nobody had found the right idea to make these things work, to bypass the problems revealed by the research… until then.

The impact was tremendous. The costs of ground-to-orbit travel had suddenly decreased by several orders of magnitude. In a moving speech, Hotaru Tomoe spoke of Tsiolkovsky and how Apex wanted to fulfill his dream of space colonization. They had therefore made public domain some of the technology of the Wayfarer. Of course, most governments knew that it just meant that Apex had already moved forward.

The proof came in the beginning of 1989, when six Wayfarers chained mission upon mission to carry up the pieces of a new space station. At first, it was just something normal then… people realized construction workers were staying up there and that what was assembled looked like a smaller version of the space station in Kubrick's movie 2001, with a structure at the center of the gravity rings that seemed designed as an assembly hangar. The place was named Station Gateway.

The Babel Space Center became operational the same year, which led to other questions. The Wayfarer took off like a plane, so equatorial launch facilities had less of an interest. Then, during a talk show, one of the experts noted that Japan had obtained the geosynchronous orbital slot right on top of Babel and had plans to construct the largest space station ever built there. Another expert then asked jokingly if they wanted to build an orbital lift. Apex confirmed during a press conference a few days later, giving an estimated completion date for 2015.

What had been revealed of the project seemed mad, as it included fetching an asteroid and stabilizing it, then using part of its mass to produce the thousands of kilometers of cable necessary to link it to the ground. For many, it was preposterous, pure science fiction. It changed when, in 1991, a common Australian and Japanese mission, using Apex technology, created Serenity Base on the moon, the kernel of what was now Serenity City, the first lunar colony.

Understanding that the space colonization rocket was flying too high and too fast to be stopped, an emergency summit was held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. The treaties regarding space were reexamined and a new Space Colonization Treaty drafted. Territory would now be allocated to all nations by an UN commission following criteria like economic weight, population, territory on Earth and ability to go up there. For once, the UN had been terribly efficient as nobody could afford to dally. The Australian-Japanese Space Agency had no reason to wait.

The treaty, as well as the new space race, had side effects. The European Union accelerated its unification agenda, among other things to pool their territory rights. Japan and Australia, already economically linked through the web spun by Apex during the eighties, welcomed Taiwan and several island nations in the structure that would become the East Pacific Alliance in 1995.

_And now, in 1997, we're on Mars, _thought Joyce. _Seems like the futurists of the sixties got it partly right, even if it didn't seem like it when the Apollo program was closed. _

"I heard that there are talks about having a permanent population here," said Kowalski.

"It's true that it has been evoked during some of the recent meetings but there are difficulties with having children up here for the moment," said Usagi. "While the base is sufficiently shielded from cosmic radiations, most of the installations being underground, there is the matter of the gravity. Thanks to the experience all nations are now sharing about the effects of space on living beings, we are pretty confident in having adults here for extended periods of time, provided they follow a training regimen to maintain muscle mass and bone density. The issue is that we don't know enough of the impact of lighter gravity on the growth of children."

"But there are studies done in this matter."

"Of course. You know my opinion on the matter, Dave. It's time for humanity to leave her cradle. The people currently on Mars will have to live there for months while they wait on the next launch window. They will also pave the way for the first settlers."

_- Tokyo, nearly at the same time -_

"Shouldn't you be downstairs, celebrating with the people from the astronautics department?"

Hotaru raised her head, smiling and looked at the pink-haired woman that just entered her penthouse's living room. The Mars landing images were playing on the giant screen in front of the couch she was sitting upon, but she was more interested by the one year old girl in her arms.

"I have interviews tomorrow with NHK and probably others during my trip to California next week… No, tonight is Usagi's show and since she's giving the interview from the Moon… Besides, it also allows me to spoil my goddaughter," added the Senshi of Saturn, mussing a little the silvery hair of the little girl.

Hotaru smiled as the baby took her godmother's finger in her hand, put it in her mouth and bit it.

"Looks like she's hungry," said the other woman, smiling at her baby daughter.

"Yes… and her fangs are growing nicely… Akasha, there is a baby bottle in the heater."

The woman called Akasha went to the apparel that was part of the bar and stopped it to extract a baby bottle maintained to a tasty 37 degrees Celsius. The bottle had been obviously developed for it and even had a kind of filter to separate efficiently any clot.

_Some of us that became rich used it to gain power… Hotaru also used it to create everyday appliances for the modern vampire._

Akasha remembered that day of 1985 when Hotaru Tomoe came to the Shuzen Castle. Issa Shuzen, the clan head had tested her power like he always did for new arrivals, pitting her against one of his lieutenants. Hotaru had fought well enough to earn her place, but not enough to provoke jealousy. Issa, as well as herself and Issa's wife Gyokuro had however perfectly understood that Hotaru was holding back and had preferred to promote peace rather than establish dominance.

_Something that made me look to her as a potential friend, while Gyokuro despised her lack of will to use her power… and a friend she is, donating her blood to help me save Moka when she was born so weak, declaring herself her godmother following the human tradition…_

The little girl was now following the bottle with big scarlet eyes and Akasha took her in her arms, feeding her.

"Here… tasty AB positive, freshly donated from today," she said, remembering the label on the bottle.

She sat near her friend with Moka on her lap. Her baby daughter was still drinking happily, enjoying the taste of blood.

"How was your date with Issa?" asked Hotaru.

"Nice…"

"My offer still stands, you know."

Akasha sighed. She was, technically, only the mistress of the head of clan Shuzen. Issa's wife really didn't like her and her daughter. Hotaru had more than once proposed her to come live at the Arcology and to take Moka with her.

"It's… I cannot leave the castle and Moka has her big half-sister Kalhua. Besides, Gyokuro is not always there."

"I won't force you. I just want you to know that there will always be a place for you and Moka, here."

"Hotaru… I know that you and Usagi are probably the richest Yokai on Earth and with her being a Yasha it reminds me of the time I traveled with Touhou Fuhai. You also did a lot by funding Yokai Academy and giving work to many of us. But you must also know that some Yokai hate you."

"Them and a good part of the Western Demon factions, starting with the ghouls…"

Akasha had a disgusted scowl. While 'western vampires' called vampires like Hotaru, Moka or her Purebloods, the latter considered themselves the only true vampires. They therefore called the 'common vampires' ghouls, considering demon-infested corpses had no right to be called vampires.

"A pity we're not more numerous… I do my best to be tolerant towards most Yokai species but… ghouls. As Kahlua would say: Eew!"

Hotaru smiled, remembering Moka's half-sister. She was now a bouncing four year-old girl. She was also gentle, disliking violence as much as a vampire could. While, contrarily to ghouls, Purebloods vampires had a soul, their instincts, the very way their brain was wired, wasn't human. Battlelust and pride were a part of them. They understood life and death in a way that would have looked psychopathic to many humans. They could fight with pure killing intent one minute then laugh together the next without the slightest hard feeling.

"As for the 'domestic menaces'… let's see if I can guess: Gyokuro and her clique of human-haters are a given. I know that they call me the blood traitor behind my back. Not more for now but they won't hesitate to gang on me if they feel they can get away with it. Which could be amusing…"

Akasha smiled to her friend, wondering once again how powerful her friend truly was.

"Don't forget the Miao family," said Akasha. "Since Usagi helped the Huang to relocate to Taiwan to escape the problems with Hong Kong's retrocession…"

_- Oahu, 15 Aug 2000 -_

"I'm glad to see that the twins and Celia get along so well," said Lorraine 'Lolly' Takahashi to her sister.

In the living room, two three-year old were busy playing with their slightly younger cousin.

"How are things go with Seiki's family?" asked Joyce.

"I think they accepted me… and things are a lot better now that I speak Japanese."

Joyce put her hand on her sister's. Four years ago, Lolly had fallen in love with and married a Japanese engineer working in Hawaii. The rather traditional parents of Seiki Takahashi had a hard time accepting their gaijin daughter-in-law.

"If I remember well, your mother-in-law…"

"She knows English fairly well… but she prefers to help me improve my Japanese if you see my meaning."

Joyce giggled. She remembered how Lolly had told her that Sadako Takahashi had made it her mission to 'civilize' her daughter-in-law.

"Are you still…"

"Moving to Tokyo next year? Yes. Seiki is being promoted with the end of his project here. Celia is still very young, she will adapt… probably better than me."

"With the new jets, Tokyo is only four hours away from Los Angeles… well six if you count formalities at both ends. We'll come visit… and you'll do the same."

"Yeah…"

Joyce hugged her sister.

_- Apex Arcology, Tokyo, 1 Jan 2001 -_

Usagi was holding an ice pack against the top of her head. The party she had attended in Taipei with most of the Huang family had been rather… wild.

_And Touhou Fuhai probably gave lessons about being an old pervert to Grandpa Hino… _

The party had also catered to a political necessity. By helping the Huang to relocate from Hong Kong to Taiwan, thus escaping problems caused by the retrocession of the colony to China, Usagi had encroached on the territory of the Zheng Dao Hui, Taiwan's main Triad. Negotiating a treaty between the two organizations had taken her three years and this New Year party was in fact the occasion to celebrate the peace.

She crashed on Hotaru's couch, preferring to keep her eyes closed, all three of them. This was another reason for which she got along very well with the Huang. They were all Yashas, spirits of good or bad fortune. They were the last of the people of Nemesis.

_And the power of Sailor Nemesis saw fit to change me to match my position as their queen… At least, with the black crescent on my brow changed into my third eye, I don't have that shudder every time I look in the mirror and forget to cover it with a glamour. _

"You had a reason to tell me to leave my nice, comfy bed?" asked Usagi as she felt Hotaru entering the living room.

"Too much sake?"

"If only… the barmen at the club I was last night have a knack to whip up mean cocktails."

"Drink this, it will help you recover," she said as she gave her a glass of honey-colored liquid.

Usagi sat and took the glass. It didn't smell like alcohol but she remembered some of the 'tonics' Hotaru had a tendency to mix, including elements like raw beef liver. She took a sip, then, almost immediately, a second, bigger one. It was wonderful. The headache was disappearing and she felt her energy replenishing.

"What is it?"

"Amrita."

She remembered that name. Amrita, also called ambrosia, was a magical drink brewed during the Silver Millennium. She also remembered that the recipe was lost with the fall of the planetary kingdoms and the remaining stocks since long drunk or gone stale.

"How?"

"You remember the problems we had in Sanaiscara?"

Hotaru grunted in a very unladylike manner. The installations of Saturn's capitol city had been barely working which was why they had cut their stay to the shortest. Among other things, the only things that were still edible were foul-tasting survival pills.

"You mean that?"

"Yep, I mean exactly that."

One of the things that the Sailor Senshi, apart maybe from Pluto, never remembered correctly was the extent of the Silver Millennium technology. Of course, Ami had guessed a lot from studying the Mercury computer but… she was still far from it.

As a corollary to that memory hole, there was a part of Beryl's attack that the Senshi did not remember: the intricate computer viruses that crashed the Matrix of the Moon Kingdom, preventing most of the automated defenses from working… as well as killing a lot of the population that depended on artificial environments on several of the planets. Selene's desire of centralization, by standardizing and networking every system, had actually made the attack possible… except on the quarantined Saturn.

Because of some basic information links still existing, Sanaiscara's systems were still affected, but the chain of failures could not reach the point that destroyed physical systems in other places. The Saturnian computer network was already rebooting and restoring backups when the reincarnation spell was cast.

The Silver Crystal magic rewrote reality to create the planetary castles, poor replacements of everything that had already been lost. Worse, it forced what was left of the administration AIs to play the role of the Sailor Guardians. Saturn's computer systems could never finish their reboot. Stuck in a loop that strained the systems more and more, Sanaiscara was reduced to emergency power when Hotaru and Usagi reached it in 1981.

"We were lucky that my grandmother did not revoke your administrator privileges."

"She had no need. Sanaiscara was quarantined. We could receive data, but not send anything in the network. Her intent was either to let us rot or that the imprisonment would convince us to leave for another system. With Nirrti missing, I didn't want to go and chose to wait in coldsleep."

"She could still have erased it to be sure that… and if she let them be, hoping you would correct her mistake?"

"With everything falling apart around her like it did… that's possible."

"You could ask her avatar in Serenity City?"

"Sorry… but no. It is better if we never see each other again."

"As you wish… so the repairs are finished?"

"Yes, which means, among other things, that I can now do that. Mini-me?"

"Can you please cease to call me like that?" replied the eerie voice of the Saturn Guardian. "It was already grating when I was forced to use chibi-you as avatar…"

"Then appear under your real guise so that Usagi can see you."

"As you wish…" replied the AI, its voice deepening.

A holographic avatar appeared in the living room. At first, it was almost looking like the child version of Sailor Saturn Usagi was used to. It soon started to morph, becoming a rather chubby man with… an elephant head.

"Ganesha," said Usagi… "Of course. In the Puranas, it is said that Parvati molded Ganesha out of clay to protect her and that Shiva, having decapitated him, replaced his head with the one of an elephant."

"Translated: I created the main code and my late husband found it too aggressive and single-minded. He rebuilt part of it to add safeguards and full sentience," said Hotaru. "Thank you, Ganesha."

The elephant-headed hologram winked at them.

"Now that we have full access to my old resources, we can think about repairing what can be on the other planets. The full access to the sensors also allowed me a confirmation: the others are reincarnated since roughly 1997. I cannot tell exactly when or who they are."

"I think we should find them, but stay hidden, maybe just stir their lives a little in case it's too shitty. They're toddlers, so let them live their lives for now. As Mom wished for us 'to all be together again', destiny is probably already weaving links between us… On my side, thanks to my summoning training with Touhou Fuhai, I think I should be able to find our two furry friends."

Hotaru smiled. Seeing the two mooncats Luna and Artemis would be really nice…

"Speaking of Touhou Fuhai," said the vampire, "you should bring him a crate of Amrita. From what I was able to deduce, he should appreciate it."

Usagi leaned back on the couch, enjoying the way the legendary drink made her feel all fuzzy inside. Amrita was indeed the liquor of immortality… but only for organisms geared to benefit from it. In other words, it replenished the life energy of the members of the races that settled the planetary kingdoms. Ordinary humans – or other nonhuman races – only had a temporary energy boost, with a cumulative risk of metabolic meltdown.

"Sure… but it will probably tip him on who we really are."

"They already have their doubts anyway. By the way… another thing I managed to repair is this," said Hotaru as she gave her a small golden stick with four claws forming a globe at each end.

"That looks like a vajra," replied Usagi, remembering representations of Indra.

"It's just a different model of the henshin stick you had as Sailor Chibimoon. I linked it to Nemesis, but you can still customize the appearance of the stick and the one of your battle armor."

"Customize?" she asked, her eyes sparkling. "You mean… I can choose my own costume?"

"Yes, you can. I uploaded the manual on your server."

"Thank you, sis!" said the pink-haired Senshi, hugging her adoptive sister.

Hotaru smiled, thinking that now that she had cracked those codes, she had a costume to design too.

_After all, it often happens in manga too… new season, new costumes. _

_- Los Angeles, Spring Break 2006 -_

"Too bad you two got that nasty bug at the same time," said Elisabeth 'Buffy' Summers.

Celia Takahashi, Buffy's cousin, sighed. It was true that being stuck in the hospital instead of enjoying her stay in California was a pain, but with that new flu they spoke about in the news, her aunt and uncle had preferred to have them in observation at the hospital for the night. She had to admit that she was still feverish, but she would be glad to go to her cousin's home the next day.

"Mom wanted no discussion, Liz," said Dawn, who had always refused to call her sister Buffy. "At least Celia and I are in the same room."

"Relax cousin," said Celia. "We'll be home tomorrow… and the weather is dreadful anyway."

Buffy smiled. They still discussed a moment and after she had left, the two sick nine-year old decided to take a nap.

"Do you still… have your dreams?" asked Celia.

"Yeah… but they vary. In the latest, I'm on a kind of makeshift tower that stands above field of… there are a lot of people lying on the ground below and I think they're dead. Someone I believe to be Liz, but grown-up, is trying to console me about something then she jumps in a huge light. That's the point where I wake up shivering."

"The one about the Moon was cooler."

"Yeah… it was. Let's try to sleep, okay?"

Dawn had been plagued by bad dreams for years. In those dreams, things usually ended badly. She had kept some of the details for herself. She was astute – some would say cynical – enough to know that the child psychologist she had seen about it would not react well if she told them she witnessed people being killed with rather gruesome details in some of them. She didn't know how, but she was less scared by the deaths than by the feeling of powerlessness that usually overwhelmed her during those dreams.

She drifted into sleep. As usual, a dream started, though it was a new one. She was in the hospital room she shared with Celia and some other kids. There was a man entering the place, with a black cloak and a large-brimmed hat. He walked silently and had a strange face. When he approached one of beds, the one that was the nearest of the entry, she saw his face better and knew that it wasn't a man. It was a bogeyman with huge fangs and creepy eyestalks that moved out of the monster's eye sockets. From the way the child the eyestalks touched started to breathe, she knew that she would witness death.

"No… Enough," she said as she got up, bracing against the fever. "I cannot stand it anymore."

The bogeyman turned, looking at her.

"You cannot stand it anymore… then maybe I should take you first to end your pain. What do you think, child?" it asked with a derisive voice. "You have such lovely colors," it added as its eyestalks retracted, looking now fully at her. "I wonder how you will taste."

Dawn felt disgusted by the gaze of the thing, like if it dirtied her solely by looking at her. She scowled; trying to call on that older version of herself she sometimes was in her dreams.

"I dare you to try… youma. These children are under my protection," she said, in a voice that suddenly sounded far older than her years.

This word, the way she had called the monster had escaped her lips without her knowing where it came from. She didn't care. She felt something rising in her, banishing the fever. For an instant, the bogeyman flickered, but her eyes adjusted. She was seeing it a lot more clearly. She saw when the creature had begun and knew when it would end. She stood defiantly, taking a fighting stance.

The demon known as Der Kindestod was about to laugh when he saw something on the kid's brow. A symbol was shining in black lined with almost blinding neon green, a symbol that looked like a horizontal eight.

"It doesn't matter, little witch. You're barely standing."

Dawn didn't listen. She knew the moves. She had done them countless times in so many timelines. Contrarily to what some believed, she didn't need her staff for this… spell. Her left hand moved, wrapped in a comet of black strands of mist that reeked of the foul stench of the Styx. Her right hand moved, dragging glowing amethyst wisps in its path.

She saw the demon rush and she determined all the possible outcomes. She danced to the left, making the step that would allow her to dodge its first slash while her hands joined, mixing the two mists.

"Dead…" she started to whisper.

The mists merged, becoming blinding amethyst light, like a small ringed planet between her hands. She knew she was far from her usual power, but it would be more than enough. Outer possible outcomes came to her mind, and she chose to make another step, dodging another lash.

"Stay still so that I can flay you!" yelled the demon.

She put a knee on the ground, pointing her hands towards the monster.

"…scream."

The 'planet' left her hands, striking the bogeyman from below and slamming it against the ceiling. It screamed as it felt its matter unravel, its molecules dispersed not only through space, but through time.

"What… what are you?" it asked.

"Guarded by the Planet of Time, I am the Soldier of Revolution, Sailor Pluto!" she said, a mysterious smile on her lips, while the youma finished disintegrating.

"Still too early," she said with a tired voice as the symbol on her brow faded. "I can sleep a while more."

Dawn didn't try to understand too much about the sense of that dream, but it had felt good to be able to do something for once. She would try to remember that for the next one.

In the next bed, Celia looked with round eyes, wondering if the fever did make her see things. She had often played superheroes with Buffy and Dawn but this…

_My cousin is a magical girl!_


	3. The Times They Are A-Changin' (Part II)

_Author notes: Some of the dialogues in this chapter are directly adapted from Chapters 32-33 of Rosario+Vampire _

_I hope you will enjoy this new chapter. Please do not hesitate to review. _

_- Los Angeles, 12 April 2006 -_

Dawn was feeling more than happy to leave the hospital. The weather was nice and sunny today. Actually, it felt like if the oppressing shadow of the last days had been dispelled. Also, she felt great, feeling no trace of yesterday's fever.

_And that dream was really fun… a nice change from my usual ones. _

She brushed her long emerald hair. Sometimes, she had wondered if she should not dye it black, to better fit in. Some of the kids at school called her a weirdo because of it. Because of the dreams, though, she had ceased to wonder. Green was her color, period. She went out of the bathroom and rejoined Celia in the room they had shared with a few other sick kids the last night.

"How do you feel this morning?" asked Dawn to her cousin.

"A lot better, cousin," replied the half-Japanese with a smile.

_And I think it's thanks to you, Sailor Pluto, _she added mentally.

Celia had spent enough time reading shojo mangas like Wedding Peach to know how important it was for the trusted friend to keep the magical girl's secret identity. She had even gone so far as quietly discussing with the other kids to see if they had noticed anything. But, to them, another magical girl trope seemed to have come into play. While they had seen a green-haired girl destroy the demon, they were somehow incapable to link her with Dawn, despite the obvious resemblance. She was pretty sure that, with time, they would even forget the event as some kind of childish fantasy.

"Are you both ready?" asked Joyce.

"Yes, Mom," said Dawn.

_- San Francisco, 14 April 2006 -_

From the outside, he looked like any other homeless person, perhaps a little cleaner which could have meant that he had not done that for long. However, he was no ordinary person. Ordinary persons, even homeless ones, usually didn't hunt rats in the sewers of San Francisco. More than all, they didn't eat them, or rather, they didn't drink their blood.

Suddenly he raised his head, having heard a nearby heartbeat, then another. There was a middle-aged woman in a black suit that looked right out of a conspiracy movie at the entrance of the alley, and a large man with similar clothes at the other end.

_No, not a man. He smells like a demon._

"You are not an easy… man to find, Angel," said the woman.

"Who are you?"

"My name is Rui Kisugi and I have a proposal for you. I know that you have been looking for ways to atone for what… a part of you did in the past. For the moment, you are using a kind of asceticism to punish yourself. I can give you a chance to do more… and I promise: no submarine," she added with a smirk.

This promise was enough for him to know who she was. There were very few people knowing about that incident. Either she was from the Demon Research Initiative or she was related to Spike or the vampire he had the misfortune to sire during that… mission. With her 'Man in Black' suit, he was betting on the former.

"You're from the DRI… last time I was forced to work for your organization, it didn't end well."

"Things are different now, Angel. Our mandate is different. I won't force you, but I would like to hire you. I let my card on this dumpster. Go around town, interact with the demon community and see for yourself."

The woman and the demon left. Angel walked to the dumpster and took the small white paper rectangle.

"Bureau of Metahuman Affairs…"

_- Los Angeles, 18 April 2006 -_

"Dawn-chan, can we talk?" asked Celia.

The youngest of the Summers' twins raised her head from her book.

"Sure, what do you want to talk about?"

"I'm leaving tomorrow and… well I've tried to drop some hints but you didn't… I want to talk about Sailor Pluto."

Celia looked at her cousin. With some people, you had the impression that you could hear the gears clicking in their head when they thought about something. No such luck with Dawn. It wasn't that the 'noise' was too quiet to be heard. It was just that it was always here, assembling thoughts in weird ways and computing every possibility in a mind that felt far too… ancient for such a young body.

"Cel-chan… I thought it was just another dream," she said, her eyes as hard as the amethysts they shared color with.

"I believe you but it was real… or I made the same dream just at the same time."

Dawn got up, trying to move her hands the same way she did in the dream, to capture what she had felt at that moment.

"I don't feel it…"

"Maybe you only can when… you really need it."

"Maybe. Can you… not tell anyone about it? Even Liz-chan?"

"Promised," said Celia. "Dawn-chan, I think I have an idea about your dreams. A few months ago, I spoke with one of my uncles who is a bonze. He was teaching me things about Buddhism. He told me that sometimes, people remembered things from their previous lives."

Dawn nodded, closing her eyes. When she thought about most of her dreams that way, it made sense. An awful kind of sense. She started to shake, tears running on her cheeks, only stopping when she felt her cousin hugging her.

"Cel-chan… the dreams. I didn't tell you everything. They're often awful. If they're things that really happened, if I really lived that…"

"It's all right, cousin, I'm here for you. That night, you said that it was too early, that you could still sleep a little. I think it was the 'older' you speaking."

Dawn nodded, sniffing. Maybe things would change later but, for now, she just wanted to be a normal kid.

_- Alameda, 18 April 2006, shortly after sunset -_

Angel was looking at the building, comparing it with the address written on the business card of that Kisugi woman. It seemed that the Bureau of Metahuman Affairs had appropriated, and probably heavily refurbished, a part of the former Alameda Naval Air Station. From what he had learnt, officially, a bunch of Silicon Valley companies had made a deal with the government to rehabilitate part of the base when it closed in 1995.

_Or, rather, they transferred property to another governmental agency… _

From the outside, it looked like it was part of a series of modern office and research buildings, with a helipad built on the water. A look in the business registries had revealed nothing out of the ordinary but that was to be expected. He entered in the lobby, soon reaching the information desk. The woman behind it looked like a typical secretary… to the unobservant one. To him, the determined way she looked at him and the nervousness in her right arm, whose hand he guessed was ready to press a button with nasty consequences, told a whole different story.

"Good…" he started.

"It's all right, Gladys," said a feminine voice on the side. "Mister Angel has been cleared."

"Very well, Agent Kisugi," replied the receptionist, the tension in her arm lessening.

Angel looked sideways. Rui Kisugi's… probable sister given the resemblance, was younger, only a little more than thirty. She was wearing the standard black suit and white shirt; though she had preferred pants to the skirt he had seen on her sister and had added fine black leather gloves. She also had a casual way to stand that completed with her short wavy hair gave a lot more rebellious impression than the calm elegance of Rui.

She walked towards him and extended her right hand. As he shook it, he noticed that her grip was strong for a woman of her size.

"I'm Ai Kisugi, Rui's sister. Nice to see you decided to come see us."

"Yes I… I did what your sister told me and spent the last days checking things about your organization."

"Hmm… let's get out of the public area before we discuss further."

She led him through the halls until they took an elevator and went down. The traveled through another set of nondescript halls and they reached a conference room where a dossier was waiting on the table. She motioned for him to take place in front of her.

"So… as you're here, I suppose you're interested in joining the Men in Black."

"I thought it was only a nickname the demons gave you?"

"A lot of us prefer it to the official designation, even if Bureau of Metahuman Affairs is what stands on the forms. So?"

"Yes, I'm interested. I checked the rumors and tried to uncover the stories behind them. San Francisco is a lot safer for both humans and demons thanks to you. It's the fact you're treating all species the same way, looking only at how they act, that interested me the most."

"In the end, we're only cops and the law should be the same for everyone. As you certainly learnt we're also active in other parts of the country."

"Yes but you only have limited manpower and therefore cannot be everywhere."

"Why do you want to join us?"

"Like your sister said, I have hidden for too long. If I help you, I will be able to do some good."

Ai opened the dossier and made it slide towards him. Just as he had thought, it was a contract. He spent a few minutes to go through it. The clauses were rather simple and devoid of any fine prints. The contract also stated clearly it was magically binding.

He took a deep breath then signed up.

"Welcome to the Men in Black, partner," said Ai with a smile.

_- Alameda, a few minutes later -_

They had taken another elevator, going down once again.

"Did you construct all of this? It looks like a kind of fallout shelter."

"That's exactly what it is. The Navy built it in secret during the fifties and finally abandoned it due to water infiltration problems. We inherited it during the eighties and refurbished it. At the time, the deal was that we used an entrance from outside the base. Now that we also own the terrain in surface, things are easier."

"And the government agrees with all of this?"

"We're mostly self-funded through several front companies, which makes it easier for the bean counters in Washington to forget we even exist… and by the way, that movie ten years ago: we funded it as part of a disinformation operation."

Angel wasn't seeing what she was talking about, but he had missed a lot of things during the last three decades.

"Why the Men in Black?"

"My brother-in-law's idea. The goal is to make any sighting of our agents a lot more likely to be disbelieved as a kind of conspiracy craziness. Here's my office. Coffee?"

The room they were in was a typical office with two desks, though only half of it seemed currently occupied. Angel noticed with interest an engineering diploma on the wall. Ai switched on an espresso machine.

"Yes, please."

She removed her jacket and gloves and Angel noticed at first that her white shirt was armless. Then his eyes felt on her right arm and couldn't detach from it. While its shape was perfectly human, mirroring the one of her normal left arm, its skin was made of chromed metal pieces.

"I suppose you're wondering about my arm," said the woman while preparing two espressos.

He nodded. He knew that prosthetics existed. But he would have expected something bulky and moving with difficulty, not an arm with a perfect human shape moving with all the grace of a real limb. Even more, he had the feeling that the chromed skin was a matter of aesthetics rather than a necessity.

"Your dossier says that you have been 'out of touch' for the last three decades. You were living in various cities, but not really paying attention to things beyond what concerned your immediate survival. Is that right?"

"Mostly."

"Okay… I understand better why Rui put you with me. You're in dire need of explanations if you're to function as a MIB and I'm definitely a modern girl."

"Is your arm… a common prosthetics?"

She put the two filled cups on her desk. Angel savored the aroma. He had almost forgotten how it smelled.

"Glad to see you seem to like it. I make my own mélange… to come back on the matter of my arm: common, no. Available for people with enough money, yes. A series of breakthroughs was done during the nineties, for things ranging from artificial muscle fibers to micro fuel cells that can burn glucose retrieved from blood. The first really functional cyberlimbs – ones that are connected to the nervous system and with a sense of touch – date from 2002, with Laurent Fournier. He's a quadruple amputee that volunteered to get his four limbs replaced as an experimental project between the EPFL and Lausanne's University Hospital. As it was a success, the scientists behind that project founded a company. Concurrence followed, and four years later, cybernetics is a booming market. If the trends evolve like they did with computers, cyberimplants will be a common consumer product around 2015 or 2020."

"But… prosthetics are only useful for amputees… I fail to see how it could become a consumer product like a television or a car."

Ai smiled and put her cybernetic arm in position for a strong arm match. Angel raised an eyebrow, then decided to oblige her. He started to move expecting to win quickly. The only thing that went away quickly was his assurance on the matter. It was hard. Even with his vampire strength, he had to struggle to win against the mechanical device.

"You see why?" said Ai, breaking the grip.

"I see… You think people will be willing to… cut healthy limbs for that?"

"Yes, I think they will, even more so that realistic skin coverings are already available for those who want to keep things invisible. But you also have designers looking into the subject, creating coverings like mine. However, you also have to keep in mind that cyberlimbs are only the most visible thing. A lot of implants will be far more discreet."

"Like?"

"A Japanese company called Apex is working on extended neural interfaces, a thing they call the cyber-brain. If I interpreted correctly the papers of Saeko Mizuno – she's their lead researcher in the domain – the user will have – among other things – a perfect memory and the capacity to hold several trains of thought simultaneously."

Angel frowned as Ai continued her explanations of the various technical advances of the last thirty years. He understood also better the remarks of some of the demons he had met during those last days. Many demon factions had accepted to cooperate with the Men in Black because they were afraid, afraid of what human technology could do now.

_- Sunnydale, almost at the same time -_

Willow Rosenberg was alone at home. Even if she was only nine, it wasn't such a rare thing for her. Her parents were both scientists who were often traveling. In fact, since she was six, her parents had decided she was mature enough to stay alone when they had to travel. It had been hard at first, even with the help of her friends, Xander and Jesse. She often felt lonely and the house so cold and empty.

_Almost nine PM. I have to take my medicine._

She reached the bathroom and opened a carefully labeled box with a lot of small compartments. She took the pills in the one with today's date and gulped them with a little water. Her mother had really insisted on the fact she had to take them every day and this was one thing about which she had never disobeyed, not when she remembered how sick she had felt when she forgot only one day.

The little girl got down to the basement. Contrarily to other houses, it wasn't a place to just store unused things. It was a place where her mother worked when she was here. Willow was actually familiar with the place, having often sat on the big 'dentist chair' while wearing the Helmet, her mother asking her to think about certain things.

Even if she felt a little lonely, her life wasn't bad. She knew she was smart, smarter in fact than all the other kids. However, she had also quickly learnt how to be 'just good' in class. She didn't want her mother to send her to a school for geniuses, away from her friends. It was also because of that that she went with helping her mother in her work, even if she knew it wasn't really normal.

"Internet connection on… all the apparels are powering. Almost ready," she said as she sat on the dentist chair, covering herself with a blanket.

Willow didn't have many friends. She had only three. Xander and Jesse were the first ones. She knew them since kindergarten and they had always gotten along. The third was more recent and… well most people believed he was imaginary and it was probably better that way. The others, even Xander and Jesse, they wouldn't understand. What Willow knew, however, was that the day she met him, her life had changed. She remembered quite well the date. It had been the 8th of August 2003. It had been the first time she had used the Helmet on her own.

She put the apparel on her head. Back then, she hadn't understood what it was doing to her. Then, last week, she had watched an old movie from the eighties at Jesse's house. It was called Tron. She remembered staying agape as the pieces finally connected in her mind, as she finally understood what her personal Land of Oz was. Willow flipped the switch and, once again, she felt like Alice falling in a rabbit hole made of neon light.

_When I was six… I thought I was dreaming. I know better now. He probably thought I was too young. _

As the world stabilized around her, she recognized the place. She was where the 'dream' always started, near a pyramid with a name she had sometimes seen on bills, the ones about electricity. It had changed since her first dream though. The first time, things had looked… rough, like if she was walking in a half-finished drawing. It had felt sad to her and she had wished to have her color pencils. They had appeared immediately in her hands and she had started to draw, to complete what she saw.

What had been funny was that when she finished something, it had started to spread. Then, she had sung and walked in the strange land, drawing a little thing here and there, than watching it spread with glee. After a while, in a remote corner, she had completed a drawing of an animal and it had started to move.

Willow strolled on the neon bridge, taking care not to disturb the stars that passed on the road. Her friend had explained to her that the stars were messages the buildings sent to each other

"Yamata!" she called.

"I am here… my princesssss," said a strange voice as a giant snake head rose from a hole.

It was soon followed by another, and another until finally eight dark blue snake heads looked at the little girl. Willow hugged the nearest one, feeling its huge forked tongue brush her.

"Can we play?"

"Yesss, we can, but first, you must dress up."

Willow nodded enthusiastically, concentrating to modify her appearance. Her ordinary clothes disappeared, replaced by an ornate light blue kimono. Her red hair turned to raven and her skin became of the purest alabaster. She always disguised like this to play with Yamata. Also, he always called her by the secret name he gave her: Kushinada-hime.

She liked this shape. In this shape, she had magical powers. Yamata had shown her how to do. She took her two ornate fans, waving them in a way that conjured a whirlpool of cherry blossoms. Flying, she followed the eight-headed snake as they plunged in a big neon road.

"Last week-end, I saw a movie, Yamata."

"Was it good?" asked the snake.

"I liked it… It was an old movie called Tron."

"I sssee. Do you understand where we are, then?"

"It's a little like what happens to Flynn. I'm in the computer, but… my body stays on the chair at home."

"Yesss… but thisss is only part of it. Alssso, I am not a sssimple program."

"The drawing I did on you… It was like what Flynn did when he repaired the Recognizer?"

"In part. I wasss broken, asssleep for so long… Do you want to learn?"

"Yes."

"Good, then follow me, Kushinada-hime. We're going on the Moon."

"Cool."

_- Alameda, ten minutes later -_

"Ai," said a voice as the office interphone connected. "We have a Child's Rhyme."

Angel hesitated to ask what a Child's Rhyme was but was cut by his partner.

"Where?"

"The Rhyme has been heard on Clavius Base."

"Coming," said the Japanese woman as she closed the communication.

She rose from her desk and moved to leave their common office.

"Clavius is the main American Lunar colony," said Ai.

"What's this thing about a nursery rhyme?"

"The 8th of August 2003, something completely unexplained happened. There was a kind of mass hacking… and you have no idea what I'm talking about."

As they changed of floor, she explained rapidly to the ensouled vampire some basics about computers and how they communicated with each other, the sum of the connections between them being called Internet.

"So… a hacker is a kind of burglar?"

"Some are. They get in, do something, and get out. Usually, they take or modify information for their own profit."

"I suppose it's not what happened that day."

"Oh no, it's not what happened. The hacker actually fixed things in everything she touched. Entire software rewritten and working a lot better than they used to. A whole new generation of computer software was created from those ideas. Computer people call this day Child's Rhyme."

"Why?"

"Because of the nursery rhyme that was played in several of the touched systems, sung by a little girl's voice. It is still heard from time to time but nobody managed to catch her…"

Angel thought more and more that this looked like some of the ghost tales of his native Ireland. They entered a room where a gangly teen with… a cable coming out on outlet on his right temple sat at a computer station.

_Probably one of those 'neural interfaces' she told me about. _

"Angel, meet Afterburner. He decided to lend us his talents instead of spending some time in a federal prison for embezzling. Afterburner, meet my new partner Angel."

"One of those days, Icecat…" said the teen.

"I know… I love you too. So this trace?"

"Disappeared from Clavius and is probably peeking in the Soviet network of Dorsa Smirnov now. I was hoping the transmission delay between here and the Moon would slow her but… no such luck. As usual, absolutely no trace of her origin."

"What does she want?" asked Angel.

"We don't know. We call her a 'she' because of the voice in the rhyme, but… we don't know what she is," said Ai.

"My own hypothesis is that she's an Artificial Intelligence making her baby steps in the Net," said Afterburner.

"Why?"

"The things she did during Child's Rhyme… the ideas in it… their logic had nothing to do with anything designed so far. It approached problems in ways that had never been even envisaged… Also, she gets better at staying quiet every time. Whatever she is, she's learning."

_- Japanese Airspace, 5__th__ May 2006 -_

"Anything else?" asked Hotaru as she sat behind the wheel of a roadster that sat in kind of metallic room.

"Not at this time, Ms. Tomoe," replied the secretary, checking another item on his computer tablet. "I will contact your sister if anything urgent happens during your holidays."

"Good, I'll see you in a week, Vincent."

The Australian man waved goodbye to his boss while a ramp lowered in front of the car, revealing the tarmac of the Apex Hokkaido Space Center. Hotaru put her shades on and drove expertly out of the cargo hold of the Osprey that had brought her and her car from Tokyo.

She smiled as her Lamborghini Urano accelerated. Back in 1987, she had beaten Chrysler to buy the Italian company. She just couldn't resist, as Lamborghini always had been among the favorites of Haruka Tenoh, the late Sailor Uranus. It was now a nice jewel in the Apex crown. The Urano had been her way to honor her adoptive 'father', by having Lamborghini building her dream car.

_I hope she will like it when she's back. Well, Jeremy did when he tested it in his TV show… _

Hotaru remembered when the Englishman - who had been a friend of Haruka during her racing days in the eighties - had invited her to partake in his show, making the usual leap in the reasonably priced car. She had counted at least three very nervous Watchers among the studio audience that day.

"Twenty-five years and they're still trying to figure out my nefarious plan… Well, I suppose I cannot blame them too much. They're not used to have 'demon lords' exchange snarky comments with one of the BBC's top presenters…"

She took a turn. She knew the road going from her space center to Castle Shuzen very well. She was really looking forward to seeing her goddaughter again, even more so that Moka would be ten in only three days, which was why she had planned to spend the week at the castle.

Hotaru expected that things would get complicated with some members of the family, though her intelligence reports indicated that Gyokuro was still somewhere overseas. The Senshi of Saturn didn't like very much that lack of precision in the report.

Some of Gyokuro's lackey could pose her some problems, but she didn't expect anything major. Issa respected her because she was Akasha's friend. No, the problem would come from the other Shuzen daughters.

_Though not little Kokoa or gentle Kahlua… Akua, on the other hand… _

All Shuzen daughters shared the same father, but only Kokoa and Kahlua, respectively the fourth and second eldest, were Gyokuro's children. Akua, the eldest one, was the child of one of Issa's late mistresses. Contrarily to the others, she didn't grow up in the castle, but in China, in 'care' of the Miao family.

_Care is such a big word… those scums knew very well how to fuel the hate she felt toward humans for the death of her mother and turn her into their assassin. Still… Akasha told me she made some progress in 'deprogramming' her. _

Soon, the road she had taken through the rocky hills reached a dead end near a small unoccupied house. She continued right through the rock, crossing the illusory boulders to enter the cloaking field isolating Shuzen Castle from the rest of the world.

Another turn and she reached a bridge over a ravine. A castle that would have been better suited to Bavaria than to northern Japan stood on a hill, surrounded by a very dark forest.

_Why did Issa feel the need to build the castle with this style when the Shuzen lived here since the fall of Carthage, the first Shuzen clan leader probably inspiring a good part of the stories around Susano-o? From what Akasha told me, he made a trip to Europe two hundred years ago and came back with some ideas on vampire propriety right out of German Romanticism… _

She parked her car, smirking as the ultramodern blood red convertible looked really out of place near the stately Rolls-Royces used by the 'locals'. Her usual pantsuit was likewise not very suited to a place where women were expected to dress in elegant gowns. She still had time to change, however.

She got out of her car to fetch her luggage in the trunk. As she lowered to take her small suitcase, she smiled, then turned suddenly to intercept the little girl that just pounced her.

"Hello, my little tigress," said Hotaru as she hugged a redhead girl with big green eyes.

"Hotaru-neesama! I'm so happy to see you!" replied the little vampiress as she hugged her back.

Hotaru had seen the 'little tigress' grow up. Her name was Kokoa Shuzen and she was Moka's younger half-sister. The elder vampire had often sparred the little girl, taking her as a student alongside her sister.

"I'm happy to see you, too, Kokoa. How are your sisters?"

"Moka and Kahlua are well but… I think Akua don't like me very much… Oopsie!"

The Senshi of Saturn turned, setting Kokoa on the ground. She faced the new aura, one of a teen vampire girl who looked partly Chinese.

"Akua-san," said Hotaru, greeting the eldest of the Shuzen daughters.

"Tomoe-san," replied the teen on an icy tone.

Hotaru could almost taste the hate rolling from the teen. The source was evident. Akua was affiliated with the Miao Triad and hated humans. As a 'human-lover' and an ally of the Huang Triad, Hotaru was an enemy.

"Akua-san. I came to celebrate Moka's birthday. Can't we agree to make a truce for the time being?"

"Yes, but I won't let you poison her with your ideas."

Hotaru had to force herself not to smile. She could feel the pure aggression in Akua's aura. It was actually a basic reaction, a reminder of the instincts vampires shared with great felines. The means were different, but the intent was the same: establish dominance.

_But you have no way to know you are only seeing a fraction of my true power, child._

_- Shuzen Castle, 6__th__ May 2006 -_

"So, you want me to take her in?" asked Hotaru.

"Yes. Hotaru, I know I'm asking a lot, but… she has to go away from this place," said Akasha.

"Having Moka-chan live with me is not a problem and with Gyokuro coming back soon, I can guess part of the reasons why. The seal, however…"

"Please… don't ask me why."

"Very well, I'll do it. I'll take her back with me when I leave at the end of the week."

_- Shuzen Castle, 8__th__ May 2006 -_

Hotaru was sitting on the top of one of the castle's tower, trying to meditate. The birthday party had been really nice, but since she was here, a shadow was growing in her heart. She had never really spent time to analyze the aura of this place and she was sure that there was something.

Suddenly, she felt a small peak of youki and turned her inner eye towards the surrounding of the castle. Akua had used her dimensional blade technique to destroy a lock and she and Moka were entering a crypt. She followed them for a little while as they went down, following a long tunnel, but was soon forced to stop.

"A barrier… very powerful against any scrying attempt. That's why I couldn't detect anything. What are you hiding below the castle, Akasha?"

She hesitated to go down physically and see things for herself.

"No… I will trust you, my friend. After all, I have my secrets too."

_- Shuzen Castle, an hour later -_

"Is there a problem, Issa-sama?" asked Hotaru as she felt his presence behind her.

"Moka has to leave tomorrow morning."

"As you wish."

_No point in arguing. She probably has seen things she shouldn't have downstairs…_

_- On the road leaving Shuzen Castle, the following morning -_

Moka was crying, often looking behind, towards the castle.

"Kokoa… Kahlua-neesan, Akua-neesan… father, mother… Mother!"

Hotaru didn't say anything. She just stopped the car as they were out of view of the castle, hugging her goddaughter.

"I… I forgot something. The Rosary, Mother made it for me so I need to get it."

The little girl got out of the car and started to run.

"Moka-chan, wait!" said Hotaru. "Gosh, she's just as bull-headed as Serenity."

She turned her head brusquely. A veritable storm of youki was brewing in the castle. From the auras she could already feel from here, Akasha and Akua were fighting… but there was also something else. She started to run in turn. Given what she was feeling, she preferred her car to stay in one piece.

_- Shuzen Castle, three minutes later -_

"Stop!" yelled Moka as she reached to top of the stairs.

Akua and Akasha were facing each other, both her mother's red dress and Akua's Chinese one showing traces of combat.

"What is the meaning of this… why are you covered in blood, mother? You're the worst, Akua-neesan! Don't hurt mother!"

The two vampiresses looked at the little girl, Akua with surprise and Akasha with concern. No, not concern. It was the first time that Moka had been seeing fear on her mother's face.

"Why did you come back? Don't come any closer!" yelled the girl's mother.

"Moka…" said Akua, conflicting emotions warring in her. Finally, the teen made her choice and moved.

Moka tried to warn her mother, but too late. Akua slashed with her hand, her dimensional blade cutting the elder vampire's waist. Moka didn't really hear what her sister said, maybe something like thank you.

"Mother!" she yelled as Akasha fell, severed in two.

"Stay back, Moka," said Akua. "You're better off not seeing it."

"Why…why?" asked the little girl, crying.

"I'm sorry… this is who I truly am. You remember what I showed you yesterday? The creature hidden under this castle? Despising humans… hating the world… I am one of those who have succeeded in that wish. I am a descendant of Alucard."

Moka didn't listen. She felt her blood boiling, her power rising.

"Get out of my way!" she yelled, charging and kicking her sister in a nearby wall.

Moka continued to fight, feeling rage and sadness mix in her soul as her power rose. Then the castle started to shake as an inhuman wail resonated from the depths of earth.

_- Outside the castle, at the same time -_

"Shit… too late," said Hotaru as she watched huge tentacles reminding her of the creature in the Alien movie rip the ground around the castle and trash through the walls. "So that's what they were hiding… not an Old One. Rather what happened to Turok in the old times, when he 'Ascended'…"

She took out her henshin stick. It wasn't time for discretion anymore.

Akasha felt her blood freeze in her veins. Her daughter was standing on Alucard's gigantic hand, screaming as protoplasmic tendrils burrowed through her flesh to reach her vital organs. The castle was crumbling as the thing below expanded, extracting itself from its slumber and now searching for things to consume.

The vampiress let her power flow freely, putting her body back together. She had to act fast. Akua seemed mesmerized by the sight and tentacles were already latching on her. Akasha jumped, destroying them just in time.

"Be careful, Akua. If you are caught by those tentacles, your blood and body will be absorbed into Alucard…"

She felt Akua's gaze on her, her shock at seeing her up and fighting.

"Having slept 200 years, he's hungry… if you unleash your power carelessly, he'll consider you as food and you'll be targeted like Moka."

"No way! I sliced you in half with my own hands, Akasha-san!"

"I am afraid that this is not enough to kill me…"

She turned towards Alucard. They had to free Moka fast or…

"SATURN CRYSTAL POWER, MAKE UP!" yelled a voice behind them.

Akasha and Akua only owed to their finely tuned battle reflexes not to stagger as a veritable youki tsunami washed through them, impacting Alucard with a wave of purple light.

The monster staggered then roared as its hand exploded. Akasha searched for her daughter and found her up, carried by a strange woman who had jumped so high she could as well be flying. All she could really see was a black, or maybe dark purple catsuit and bone-white armor pieces with amethyst engravings and something resembling a naginata. Probably sensing the many tentacles launched after her and Moka, the armored woman turned in mid-jump and raised her glaive as to parry the incoming wave.

"SILENCE WALL!"

The tentacles crashed against something invisible, slight purple halos appearing at the point of the biggest impacts. Akasha didn't lose time and darted into attack, Akua behind her. They would continue their 'explanation' when Alucard was out of the picture.

"Akua! Just cutting won't do anything! You have to destroy them thoroughly," said Akasha.

A tentacle rushed towards her, morphing and opening like a monstrous snake. The pink-haired vampiress kicked, the shockwave shattering the protean flesh.

"Understood," replied the teen, wondering how she would be able to…

The armored woman had landed near her and put a rather shocked Moka in her arms.

"Akua-san, I trust you to protect your sister," she said.

The teen looked at the woman, not believing what she was sensing. Even the youki of Akasha Bloodriver looked like a mere candle in front of the one of… Hotaru Tomoe.

"PRESS CRUSHER!" yelled the woman, slashing with her glaive at the incoming tentacles in a purple shockwave that crushed their charge. "Akasha! Get out of my firing line!"

Akasha jumped back. She didn't have time to wonder why Hotaru's energy had gotten to such levels. She knew that her friend was suppressing her power but she wouldn't have dared to dream that she had let them see only a tiny spark of the inferno raging in her body.

The glaive whirled in Hotaru's hands. As could be expected, Alucard was still going for the biggest meal in the area and that currently meant her.

_Good, _thought Sailor Saturn.

She jumped again, catching a braid of tentacles with the shaft of her glaive to drag them away from the other vampires.

"Do you listen, monster?" she asked as her weapon cut through the protean mass, the touch of its blade burning the tendrils like Hercules did to the hydra's head. "To think one of my people could stoop so low… I have to wash this stain on our race in blood."

For Akua, the way Hotaru fought looked like a dance, each step powered like only true vampires could.

"DEATH…"

All noises started to drown in the silence. Even the roar of Alucard was as weak as a kitten's meow as something Akua could only describe as nothingness gathered around the blade of the Glaive.

"REBORN…"

Hotaru's word had felt like thunder in the utter silence that reigned in the battlefield. Colors started to fade, then to invert as everything shifted in negative around the vampiress, coalescing in ribbons of something that could be described as negative light. It was only then that Akua looked at Alucard and started to shiver. She shivered because the ultimate monster was afraid, gathering its mass as it started to flee.

"REVOLUTION!"

Noise came back at the same moment the ribbons lashed in a whirlwind of negative light, tearing through the protean mass of the monster. Alucard started to scream, its protoplasmic flesh to crystallize in black-purple obsidian as its youki waned. Soon, the obsidian started to crack, dissipating into nothingness as the huge body shrunk.

Akasha almost stumbled of surprise. She remembered her first fight with Alucard, two hundred years ago and how she, Touhou Fuhai and Tenmei Mikogami barely managed to seal the beast in a hopefully eternal slumber. Hotaru was destroying it completely, every cell turning into purple nothingness under her attack. Alucard wasn't the ultimate vampire. That title belonged to Hotaru Tomoe.

She was standing with her glaive raised above her hands, inverted light ribbons still flowing from her. Her catsuit was rather a kind of chainmail with minute links, covered with bone-white plate boots, bracers, skirt and breastplate. It didn't look ancient, rather like some kind slightly baroque combat spacesuit, all covered in engraved patterns evoking battle scenes.

Finally, she lowered her glaive. Where the castle, then Alucard had stood… all that was left was a vitrified crater… and the silence.

_- Shuzen Castle, an instant later -_

Akua was looking at her, remembering all the times during the last year when she had criticized Hotaru Tomoe for her apparent weakness and pro-human positions. To her, she had been just a failed vampire whose strings were played by the three Dark Lords, a pretty face who allowed Akasha Bloodriver, Touhou Fuhai and Tenmei Mikogami to stay in the shadows.

But, right now, she understood the truth. She had been played. They had all been played. She had used powers never seen since the Age of Gods and destroyed the mighty Alucard like an insect.

"Who… who are you?" asked Akasha to the woman wielding the glaive.

"Look at her," said Issa, arriving on the battle scene. "Feel her youki. There is no doubt. Such nobility can only belong to the prophesized one, the Once and Future Queen: Kali. Welcome back, your Majesty."

The head of clan Shuzen put a knee on the ground, bowing to Hotaru. Akasha, Moka and all the other vampires followed.

Akua fell on her knees, feeling the conflict in her heart. Every night since her mother's death, she had prayed to Kali to help her become strong. She remembered the times where Hotaru had innocently asked her if she was really ready to be strong.

"You are wondering," said Hotaru, "why I, of all people, am holding such ideas."

She had not realized that the queen, the goddess, was crouching near her.

"Hate has taken such a huge hold in your life, Akua," continued the queen of Saturn. "But once you saw Moka taken by the monster, what did you feel?"

"I… I wanted to protect her," said the teen, not daring to lie either to the goddess or to herself.

"How did that make you feel?"

"Strong… I wanted to be strong, for her."

"Strength is only a tool, Akua. The important is what you will use it for. I chose to use my strength to protect. I chose to work with humans because I think that even if they are often disappointing, they can be taught to become better. This is why I created Apex. This is why I am changing the world. What do you choose, Akua? Will you continue to walk the path of hate, ending alone and bitter like this monster, or will you lend me your strength?"

Akua looked at Moka, who was clutching to her mother. She looked at all the assembled vampires that had now risen and looked at their goddess. She looked at the goddess' eyes and felt her aura. It was immensely powerful, yet gentle. She could be ruthless, she could destroy things utterly, but she never would without cause.

_If I spurn her again… I'll lose everything. Moka, my family. Not again, never. _

"I… I'll be your blade, Kali-sama."

"Very well, my samurai."

_- Apex Arcology, Tokyo, nineteen hours later -_

"Thank you for welcoming us in your house, Kali-sama," said Issa.

"Please, Issa-kun, I never was that formal, even in the old days of the Saturn Kingdom."

Hotaru passed behind the bar of her living room, pouring two glasses of cognac and giving one to the Shuzen head clan.

"The castle is forever destroyed?"

"Unfortunately, yes. The area has to be sealed for a few centuries, to be sure to prevent any contamination. I personally estimate us lucky that the cloaking shield held enough to prevent satellite detection of our battle."

He nodded gravely. One of the first things they had done when Hotaru teleported them all here had been to check them for any trace of Alucard's in them. Thanks to the ancient Saturnian technology, treatment was possible but… far too many of the vampires, many of whom never had contact with Alucard had been contaminated and would need to spend several weeks in the Arcology's Yokai hospital.

"Gyokuro probably did this," he said. "She studied Alucard a lot before she left."

"Issa-kun… I have little choice but to issue a death warrant against her."

"I understand. My wife had been stricken from the family records and Akasha is now the clan matriarch. I know what these things would have done to us in time, reducing us into ghouls. Kokoa and Kalhua will understand too… with time. I have also sent messages to all the others. All the vampires will now stand behind you… Tomoe-dono."

Hotaru raised her glass, smiling.


	4. The Times They Are A-Changin' (Part III)

_Author notes: I hope you will enjoy this chapter._

_- Apex Arcology, 10 June 2006 -_

Moka was feeling great. She was finally out of the hospital, after a month spent floating in a kind of slimy tank. True, she had been sleeping most of the time while machines smaller than a living cell ran through every part of her body, cleaning it of Alucard's stain. She also hadn't been alone in that ordeal as most of her family had been contaminated to one degree or another.

"Well… it's different," she said as she looked at her apartments.

She didn't have only one room, but a whole suite for herself in the 'private residence' levels of the Arcology. That meant a bedroom, a living room with a kitchenette, a study and a bathroom. From what she had learnt, it was the same for all members of the Shuzen Clan. Contrarily to the romantic castle she had spent most of her childhood in, the Arcology seemed like something right out of a science fiction movie. Everything was… ultramodern wasn't even the name, it was beyond that.

_The style's not bad but… I need a nice, thick carpet, _she thought, eying the dark wooden floor and the creamy white walls.

While it was not the first time she came here, it was only now that she really understood the meaning of the word Arcology and the sheer size of the pyramid. This wasn't a simple building. This was a small, self-contained town with its own galleria, entertainment centers, offices and habitations. If she remembered well her aunt's explanations, it was also energetically independent and recycled its water in situ, using the organic waste as fertilizer for the gardens and hydroponic greenhouses.

She looked at the maid that was busy finishing putting away the many clothes Hotaru had bought her to replace the things destroyed with the castle. This was another thing to get used to. It was not the matter of having servants. They had some at the castle. It was the nature of the servants. To her vampiric senses, the maid felt dead and just as appetizing as a vacuum cleaner.

"I don't know how it is for you, but they scare me a little," said a feminine voice from the entrance of her suite.

"You, scared? I don't believe it, Akua-neesan."

There was ice in Moka's voice. While she had promised her mother to forgive, she wasn't about to forget what Akua did and said that day.

"It's not the matter of not being able to fight them if I need. It's just how much these… dolls manage to look human. With the way they move and how realistic the skin is, most people will need a moment to notice the vacant eyes and the articulation seams."

"You, know, Akua-chan," said Hotaru as she entered the room, "I intend to market this model in a little more than a year. Not necessarily with this appearance, but the physical capabilities will be the same."

Hotaru smiled as she saw the discomfort on Akua's face. Having the goddess treat her as family was still something she had to wrap her mind around. It was easier for Moka, for which Hotaru was her beloved godmother before being Kali's reincarnation.

"How much can they… understand?" asked Akua.

"They're not sentient and don't have emotions, but they can understand requests and their program includes responses to behaviors such as the display of distress. As they have wireless access, they can ask the Arcology's central AI for instructions if they reach the limits of their programming."

While Akua despised humans, she had been enough in touch with the human world to hear about some of the recent technological developments. The first AI had been revealed to the public in 2001 and, because of its voice and the then current year, had quickly been nicknamed SAL 9000 by the media, in reference to the feminine AI in Arthur C. Clarke's novels. It had raised many conflicting voices among the public, even after they had gotten used to the AI's real name: Himiko.

"Something troubling you, Akua-chan?" asked Hotaru.

"Just remembering some of the westerners' reactions about the first AI you made public. Between those who think it's a blasphemy and those who fear it…"

"And what's your opinion?"

"I grew up in China. We have a lot of stories about exceptional items gaining sentience and even the ability to transform into humans. In the stories, they often act strangely because they don't know how to be human. To me, an AI is like those artifacts."

"An interesting point of view. Grandpa Hino once told me that he used to be called to bless industrial robots, as Japanese people believe they can have their own kami, like any other object. As for Buddhists, they see robots and AI as a new kind of existence that has potential to attain Buddhahood."

"I would also say it like this," said Moka. "When Westerners think of robots, they often end up thinking about Frankenstein. We Japanese think about Mighty Atom*."

"Indeed," said Hotaru, smiling. "I bet that Usagi will be happy to know that you spent time to read her mangas… I have an appointment for the next hour. Just ask Himiko if you need anything."

_- Sixty-two levels lower, at the same time -_

Rupert Giles was sitting on the terrace of a coffee shop in the public levels of the Arcology. He knew very well why the Watchers' Council had sent him to Japan. He was expendable, a troublemaker that the Council wouldn't regret losing if Hotaru Tomoe took offense at his presence.

In the last hours, he had taken part in an organized tour of the facilities. Like most people with a TV set, he had already seen the building but coming here was something else. The Arcology was not built on an island in the Tokyo Bay. It was an island, the walls of the irregular, crystalline pyramid going from the seafloor forty meters below the surface and rising at forty-five degrees until they reached the top, eight hundred meters above sea level, with a vast array of platforms nested in the crevices of the artificial mountain.

The terrace he was on was in a park situated on one of those platforms. It was easy for him to lose himself in the mass of tourists here. After all, he was in one of the most visited places in Tokyo, a place that was considered by many as the prototype of future cities: fully integrated environments with a low ecological impact thanks to technology. For his historian eyes, used to decipher the plans of medieval cities, it looked differently. It was a fortress that would have made the envy of King Richard I.

_Or of a James Bond's villain… The protections they showed us during the tour – officially built to allow the Arcology to shield itself in case of typhoon – can transform the place in a bunker. Even the ferry and industrial harbors are internal, with doors that can close. I also bet that the subway tunnels to the coast can be closed. _

He went once again through the biographical information he had been able to gather about Hotaru Tomoe. Her grandfather had gained a lot of money during the reconstruction, after World War Two. It had allowed the next generation to build Sankakusu, the artificial island that served as the basis for the current arcology. At that time, it became a commercial district whose main features were the Tomoe Research Center and the Mugen Academy.

Then, in September 1983, Mugen Academy and the neighboring research center exploded. The official version spoke of a terrorist incident that tried to target the many wealthy exchange students but, thankfully, a defect in the bomb had it set off at night when the Academy grounds were almost empty. The investigation soon accused a Trotskyist movement that Moscow was more than happy to help Japan get rid of.

However, the Watchers knew that an occult event of apocalyptic importance happened – or rather was prevented – that night. An event that oracles assured was linked to one of England's most popular – and at the same time most mysterious – witches: the teen that went in those days by the nickname of Sailor V.

After that, the then eighteen years old Hotaru Tomoe disappeared for a while, officially as she wandered the world to mourn her father and only came back in March 1985, with the pink-haired woman called Usagi who was soon adopted as Hotaru's little sister. It was when she started to transform her family's assets into a corporate empire that spanned the entire planet.

_And again, her reappearance corresponds with an event that generated many omens, this time speaking about a 'shift in destiny'. That's when the Watchers were almost sure she was a demon… something we confirmed when she was received in Whitehall three years later, though we were never able to ascertain her species. _

The sketchy records of Hotaru Tomoe's childhood that the Watchers had managed to gather had led them to think that Hotaru Tomoe was possessed, probably since her early childhood. They thought that the demon slowly destroyed her humanity until they were able to merge, probably in 1983. During the last two decades, speculation had been going on regarding her plans.

_Plans that don't make sense… or rather that don't fit what we Watchers would expect of a powerful demon. _

Sometimes, he wondered if his old friend Ethan wasn't right, if Hotaru Tomoe was a stranded alien raised as a human rather than a demon.

"Giles-dono?"

A young woman was bowing to him in proper Japanese way. She was Caucasian, probably Australian and wore the 'stewardess' uniform he had seen on many female members of the personnel of the Arcology. From what he had seen, the secondary color of the black skirt suit was an indication of function. He had seen the same sky blue trims on the guides and accompanying staff.

"I apologize for the disturbance, but your appointment has been moved and I have been charged to lead you to the meeting place," continued the young woman.

Giles quickly took notice of his environment. Just as he had thought the number of people in black with an orange trim, in other words the security officers, in the vicinity had augmented very recently. The guide woman had obviously been sent to allow him to save face by coming like a respected guest instead of being shamefully arrested under one pretense or another.

He calculated his options. He could maybe use the public as human shields, but this would probably lead to an official complaint to the British Embassy… and Downing Street would end up asking the Council why they felt like endangering England's business relations with the East Pacific Alliance.

_Another point in which the Tomoe sisters are different from the regular demons: not only do they have access to the high spheres of the human world, but they also know perfectly well which buttons to push. _

He got up, gathering his things and followed the guide. Just as he thought, the security was moving to shadow them, covering all main escape routes. It was really subtle and most people would only have seen it in relation with an announcement about a pickpocket that was now passing on the information screens.

_Pickpocket who will probably have been 'caught' in another part of the complex once I am out of here…_

The guide woman led him through the halls and they soon reached an elevator. She stepped in with him.

_Either she is expendable or… No, she's here to make me understand they won't harm me, for now. The poor lass probably doesn't know her bosses are not human. _

A minute passed in an awkward silence as the elevator alternated between rising and moving sideways. He had read about this, about how some elevators doubled with a kind of internal metro system. He had heard American tourists call it a 'turbolift' though he hadn't caught the reference. Finally, the lift stopped and the woman bowed again.

"I hope you will be successful in your business, Giles-dono."

He got out and knew where he was. From what he could see by the windows, he was near the top of the 'mountain', where the public map of the Arcology became white. The armored doors in front of him bore the crest of Apex: a three-fold purple tomoe sitting at the center of a black unicursal hexagram.

He heard the lift door close behind him and the armored doors slid silently, revealing a young Japanese woman in a French maid uniform.

"Giles-dono, please follow me. Tomoe-sama is expecting you," she said, bowing to him.

_So it seems the devil herself wants to see me…_

"I can reassure you," continued the maid. "My mistress only wishes to speak with you. If you were to be detained, you would be in the security complex, below sea level. You will be free to leave afterwards."

The maid turned and started to walk in the hall beyond the armored door. He started to follow and the gates soon closed silently behind him. The place was, like the rest of the Arcology, too modern for his taste, but this level felt homier than the public ones. The dark wooden floor's pieces traced complex geometric patterns, meeting cream walls adorned by statues and paintings.

_Napoleon triumphant at Austerlitz… Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian Knot… Ramses the Second at the battle of Qadesh… T.E. Lawrence at Aqaba… Caesar crossing the Rubicon… Elizabeth the First knighting Francis Drake… all great warriors and charismatic leaders, _he thought while scanning the art pieces_. _

As he looked at his new guide, he could not shake a feeling of uneasiness. Something felt wrong about this maid. Her moves were too precise. All of her steps were identical, looking more like a thoroughly rehearsed performance than something natural. Then he saw another maid coming from another hall. Another maid absolutely identical to his guide.

_Demons with a collective… no, I must not think like I usually do. A lot of the power of Hotaru Tomoe comes from science. Let's try this._

"Excuse me, Miss but… are you an android?"

"Given that my body has been devised to follow the shape of the human female, the exact term is gynoid, Giles-dono."

He had been paying a particular attention to the intonations of 'her' voice. It had lacked emotion, but it could pass as a rather apathetic person. It had also been a lot more than the simple yes or no he almost expected.

_Very, very frightening._

The maid entered a room which made him immediately feel better as he smelled the familiar scent of ancient books. It was as library with many well filled stacks. As the maid led him, he looked at some of the titles, tried to resist and finally failed as he neared a papyrus in a glass showcase.

The papyrus he was looking at wasn't mystical. It was a piece of history. It was in Greek and…

"Good Lord… this was written by Alexander the Great."

"Yes," said Hotaru as she neared him. "This is a copy, however. The original is kept safe from light and humidity."

"How did you…"

"This papyrus, as well as a good half of the books in this library are an inheritance from a late friend. Setsuna always had… a taste for history."

He looked at her, discovering a rather fragile-looking woman with an ageless beauty. Black hair in a bob cut framed her pale visage. She was dressed rather casually, in a black pleated skirt and a purple turtleneck. One thing, however, was very different from the many pictures that could be found in the media. Her eyes weren't black, but scarlet, with slit pupils. Her smile also revealed vampiric fangs.

"Would you like to join me for tea? It's probably a little early, but I would like to discuss some things with you, Mister Giles," she continued.

She invited him to follow her with a gracious gesture. They soon reached a place in the library where comfortable armchairs sat near great windows.

"Please have a seat, Mister Giles," said Hotaru. "I must say that this is a surprise to find you being such an agreeable guest. My previous contacts with members of your organization gave me the habit to expect more… nervous people."

"I suppose you are talking about the time where you appeared on the BBC."

"Indeed. I could smell their fear and… well, you know how it is. It tends to make someone like me a little hungry. Tea?"

A mechanical maid had come with a tray holding a kettle and cups, depositing it on a low ebony table. They weren't the usual Japanese ones, but the kind of fine china that would have been approved by the most demanding of British ladies. Hotaru Tomoe decidedly wasn't like the typical demon lord, who usually delighted on having 'guests' crawl and cower before him. They were probably enemies, but some things, some trappings of civilization were just more important than any enmity among honorable people.

"With pleasure," he replied, his guts telling him that this particular demon would find it dishonorable to breach the rules of hospitality.

She poured two cups and he felt the delicious aroma of fine tea rise.

"I must say that you are a really good surprise, Mister Giles. It is truly agreeable to be able to sit with you like two civilized people, despite our differences. I have one question for starters. Why didn't you try to flee?"

"If I had in the public levels, there would have been political consequences, as an incident would have given the British government a perfect excuse to intrude in the Council's affairs."

"This was indeed a possibility and, by realizing it existed, you proved yourself a lot smarter than the Council's black ops team which tried to intrude in one of my African projects. Instead of coming along quietly… which would have allowed my subordinates to free them with a light slap on the hand, they fired back and it became an official matter. You can tell Travers that I will ask the Burkinabe government to release them discreetly in six months, just the time for the public opinion to forget them. In the meantime, I made sure… they would have plenty of exercise. And once you were out of the public area?"

_Translated, six months of hard labor, just to be sure they learn their lesson._

"I suppose I decided to trust your sense of hospitality."

She had a little laugh.

"Very nicely said… British humor is in my opinion a cornerstone of your culture's contribution to civilization. Well, to get to the main matter that had me arrange this meeting, I would like you to convey some information to the Inner Council. During the next decade, I intend to extend my company's operations in… a delicate area. It would not do for the Watchers to misunderstand my intentions."

"Which area?"

"A quaint little town called Sunnydale. It's on the Californian Coast. Even if you are not aware of its importance personally, the Inner Council will be."

"Why?"

"This place holds a rift to a dimension with a lot of disagreeable creatures. It is sealed… mostly. The place has a tendency to attract demons who would like no better than to open the rift… or the Hellmouth as the local demon population calls it."

"The Council will not like the idea of letting any demon faction near it."

"Contrarily to what some people in your organization like to believe, most demons are not interested in destroying this world. A lot of them just realize that their fancy lifestyle isn't possible without the human civilization to supply it. Even some of those who wish for the return of the Old Ones… they have no idea how it was then."

As he looked at the steel in her scarlet eyes, Rupert Giles just felt some of the aberrant pieces fall together in a coherent picture. The demon woman in front of him had seen the dark times where the Old Ones ruled the Earth. She maybe was an Old One herself.

_No… that's not it. I'm still missing something. _

"And you, what are your reasons? Why do you do all of this?"

"A fair question. Some of my reasons are solely mine to know, but I will tell you this. Back in the eighties, as I traveled the world, I saw signs showing that humanity was on a path of self-destruction, even without demon intervention. Oh! It would probably not have been the flashy, nuclear Armageddon kind, but rather a slow decay, a corruption that would have destroyed civilization as humans became greedy beasts. I chose to prevent it, by steering history, by whipping humanity back into shape."

"And space colonization was your mean for that."

"Let's say the most obvious one... I have here some files about the recent whereabouts of some problematic demon factions like the Sisterhood of Jhe," she said while waving at a maid holding a thick paper dossier on a tray. "Take it as a gesture of good will on my part."

_- Sunnydale City Hall, 14 August 2006 -_

"Is there a problem, Allan?" asked the Mayor of Sunnydale to his deputy.

Allan Finch was busy going through rather voluminous files.

"Just a series of building permits."

"I suppose this is important as you are handling them personally."

"It is. The total amount concerned is over forty million dollars."

The Mayor frowned then looked at the dossier. His frown deepened as he saw the header of a letter: a three-fold tomoe over a unicursal hexagram.

"Apex?"

"Yes, they bought Calax and intend to refurbish the research center Calax was about to close in Sunnydale. They have agreed to use mostly local companies to do the job. This also means the construction of several family houses for the employees who will settle here."

The Mayor felt conflicted. Politically, this was not an opportunity he could refuse without raising suspicion, even in Sunnydale. Most of his colleagues in the nearby cities would probably be ready to a lot of compromises to have a company like Apex settle in their community. After all, the news regularly spoke of the projects they had in places like Africa and on how much they had helped the local economy develop.

_But Apex is not your typical corporation that will decide to cut their losses after too many people falling prey to Sunnydale's night life… Apex means Yokai in my town. _

"This looks interesting… but won't it cause problems with the state?"

"I think not. From the agreements the Apex representative showed me, developing the Sunnydale area is a major part of the agreement signed by Apex with the Department of Commerce for the takeover of Calax. It is probable that the Governor will call you soon to congratulate you."

The Mayor called on all of his reserves of phlegm. He wondered why he had not been warned about it then it hit him. Calax was mostly based on the East Coast, in Vermont if he remembered correctly. Their Sunnydale Research and Development branch was only a minor project developed in collaboration with the University of California and that they were about to close now that the funding dried up. From Washington's standpoint, what happened in Sunnydale was just a footnote in a billion dollars deal.

He remembered what a lawyer of Wolfram and Hart had told him about dealing with Japanese companies and Apex in particular: with them, business is war. If it had been any other company, he would not have minded his town being a 'nice footnote'. But he was almost sure that the Yokai who owned the company had targeted Sunnydale all along and that Calax's main facilities in Vermont were just a bonus for them.

Currently, he just felt as cornered as Lee at Appomattox. He had no choice but to accept. If he did anything else than to nod enthusiastically, the Governor and the Secretary of Commerce would wonder why and the Men in Black would jump on the occasion to help the FBI with Sunnydale's 'gang problem'. After that… Apex would deal with his successor.

_I guess I will need a nice, calming game of miniature golf tonight… _

"Allan, is there still an Apex representative in our city?"

"Yes, Ageha Kurono. She is currently speaking with local contractors."

The Mayor found back a little of his smile seeing the blush on his deputy's face.

"Can you arrange for me to meet Ms. Kurono at the earliest opportunity?"

_- Apex Arcology, at the same time -_

Hotaru was smiling as she looked at the four girls in front of her. Now that they were living at the Arcology, she had more time to train the Shuzen sisters in the art of war. Currently, that meant teaching them Saturnian martial arts.

_And training members of my own species is a real joy… humans are so fragile. _

They were currently sparring, Kokoa against Kalhua and Akua against Moka, while Hotaru watched and corrected mistakes.

"That's all for now, girls," said Hotaru. "Now that your youki has circulated well, we can see to the second step. All vampires know instinctively how to channel their energy in their fists or kicks to power them up. While useful, this is a really raw use of our power. We can do a lot better, which is the whole point of youjutsu. Akua already knows a couple of those. However, what you are all lacking is the understanding of how these techniques are built."

She raised her hand while a ball of swirling purple light materialized in it.

"What I will teach you are the rules on how to direct your energy to do whatever you want. For example, I just duplicated here a technique used by a ninja in a popular manga. Given that I'm improvising, it's crude and rather inefficient, but I can nonetheless do it, which can get me out of a hot spot where my usual attacks would not work."

"Aunt Hotaru," asked Kahlua, "sorry to ask this… but is there any circumstances where the technique you used against Alucard wouldn't work?"

Hotaru smiled gently.

"Well… the Death Reborn Revolution can wipe out towns but it has two rather obvious defects. Can you tell me which ones?"

"Its own huge power is both an advantage and a defect," said Akua. "It's a weapon of mass destruction, so you cannot use it for precise strikes."

"Very good. Think about the battle. You all saw me. What's the other one?"

"The weapon you had, the Silence Glaive. Can you use the technique without it?" asked Moka.

"Indeed, that's a problem. The power comes from me, but the Glaive is needed to channel such amounts properly. I'll keep for myself what happens if I try to use it without the Glaive. Anyway, that's why I have a whole array of techniques, some needing the Glaive, others not. Akua, you faced a similar issue against Alucard, right?"

"Yes… aunt Hotaru. My main techniques were inappropriate against an enemy that had to be destroyed cell by cell."

"Which once again proves the importance of variety… we'll take what I'm doing as an exercise on basic energy projection. Channel your youki in your hand, but instead of simply powering your fist, visualize it exiting through the palm and forming a whirlwind…"

She continued to explain and guide while they tried to reproduce her technique. It was relatively simple for Akua, but harder for the others. For Hotaru, it was a great time. Seeing Kokoa's joy as she managed to create a ball of swirling fiery youki in her hand… It reminded her of the good times she spent in similar situations, a long time ago.

_Except it was with Nirrti, Lilith, Thrudr and Sekmeth… I miss them._

She concentrated back on her lesson.

"Very good. The next step in technique building is what I will call the 'keys'. While calling a technique with willpower alone is practical, it require a lot of concentration, which means more energy expended. Adding incantation keys makes the technique less flexible, but easier to control and diminishes the energy expenditure. What kind of keys can you think of?"

"Stances, gestures of a kind or another," said Akua.

"Words," added Moka.

"And items," added Kahlua, playing with her cross-shaped earring. 

"Very good. Each kind of key has advantages and inconveniences. Items can be removed, you can be prevented from moving or speaking, so it's a trade-off. The Death Reborn Revolution uses the three kind of keys."

"Hem… Aunt Hotaru," said Kahlua. "Why is the incantation of the Death Born Revolution in English?"

"To make a computer metaphor, my magic's 'regional settings' have been changed when I was reincarnated. I could reset them, but never really saw the need."

_- Alameda, 8 December 2006 -_

Angel was smiling as he finished to type his report on one of their last cases. He felt a lot better since he had joined the Men in Black. If he had to summarize it, he would probably say that he felt useful. Currently, it was the thought that the vampire who decided it would be fun to copycat Angelus – his former 'bad guy' identity – was dusted that felt particularly nice to him.

"Angel, I'm going to Flanagan's for steaks with Kriemhildr and Telzor. You want to join?" asked Ai, peeking in their common office.

He thought about declining and go back to his flat. Months ago, he would probably have done that and spent the evening brooding.

"Sure," he said instead.

He locked his work station and got up, taking his jacket. He soon reached the elevator, seeing a blonde woman discussing with Ai while a rather burly man waited, leaning on a nearby wall. As usual, his nose told him a different story than the relatively normal appearance of his three colleagues.

Telzor had not been too much of a surprise for him. The surprise rather came from the ring that allowed the demon to cover his scaly, reptilian skin with the illusion of a human. Kriemhildr, on the other hand…

From what he had learnt, she had been retrieved as a statue with a bunch of magical antiques brought back from Germany in 1945. She had been forgotten in a reserve until when, one day of 1984, the statue of a wounded Valkyrie suddenly became a woman of flesh and blood.

Kriemhildr had then told to the Men in Black an incredible story about the last days of the kingdom of Elysion. It had all started when the prince Endymion fell in love with the Princess of the Moon Kingdom, Serenity. The princess Beryl came to conceive jealousy towards the Moon Princess, jealousy that soon became blind hatred. She started to plot not only to depose the King Atlas but also to wage war with the Moon.

Kriemhildr was then an aide at the Asgardian Consulate. She stumbled on Beryl's plan by luck and was petrified by one of the conspirators, the General Kunzite. After that, she didn't know but neither Elysion nor the Moon Kingdom were standing anymore.

At first, the MiB thought she came from some yet unknown demon dimension. Then two things happened. The first had been Kriemhildr's reaction to the face of Hotaru Tomoe on the cover of the Time Magazine in 1987, which led to another series of explanations about the Nine Worlds of Norse Mythology. The Men in Black then understood that Nine Worlds was to be taken as Nine Planets. According to Asgardian – or rather Jupiterian – lore, Hotaru Tomoe was in fact Kali, queen of Saturn.

The second thing, one could say the final nail, had been when the NASA found ruins while digging to build Moonbase Clavius. The event was hushed. After all, it was only a few vaguely shaped stones, no? The bas-relief had been brought back to Earth and studied carefully. Very little was left, but it was enough to understand one thing. The Moon's Kingdom main city was just under Serenity City, which gave the final proof about Apex being linked to the pre-Ragnarok world.

They reached the surface, the four of them doing small talk about one thing or another. Angel felt deliciously human in those moments. Sure, his life wasn't perfect, but at least it was life, not mere day-to-day existence.

"I wonder what they are doing this time," said Kriemhildr, pointing a group of people in a non-refurbished part of the base.

"Looks like something about a boat and a big pole," said Angel.

"As long as they're not trying to debunk the myth we're supposed to represent," said Telzor.

They all laughed as they walked under the rain, soon reaching their favorite Irish pub. They sat in a box and ordered. Thankfully, the waiters were used to them or the quantities would have been… curious. While Angel didn't eat much, Ai and Kriemhildr both had, be it because of the first cybernetic implants taking their energy from consumed food or the second's Asgardian metabolism, quite higher needs than 'normal' women of their size.

"We had a run-in with our British friends in Seattle," said Kriemhildr.

Ai rolled her eyes while Angel sighed. Trust between the Watchers and the Men in Black was certainly not a given. The former had good reasons to be wary of governments meddling in the supernatural, but they failed to recognize that times had changed. Angel knew for sure that the Soviets had their own paranormal agency, officially a branch of the KGB. The Chinese probably also did. In Europe, the Vatican was notoriously becoming more active on the supernatural front. As for the East Pacific Alliance, they relied on their Yokai community, mainly using Apex and the Shinto priesthood as 'agents'.

"Speaking of wonderful news. Rui told me we're opening a branch in southern California, probably in Sunnydale."

"Oh joy…" said Telzor. "Who… your sister dumped that on you?"

"Angel and I volunteered in fact."

_- Apex Arcology, Tokyo, summer 2012 -_

Elizabeth 'Buffy' Summers lowered herself with delight in the hot water. Dawn and Celia had left to see some museum and she had been more than happy to let them both attend to their geeky activities, while she enjoyed something she had come to love every time she was in Japan: the baths. Sure, it had needed some adaptation from her part, mostly to overcome her shyness about being naked in public. In the end, though, it was no worse than the showers at school… and a lot more relaxing.

_And I must say that these baths are just gorgeous… _

Her aunt's family had moved in the Arcology a year ago, following her uncle's promotion at the headquarters of a society part of the Apex keireitsu.

She looked at her Mom, who was discussing with Aunt Lolly nearby. Joyce had gotten over her shyness quite easily and Elizabeth wondered once again where the small scars she could see here and there on her mother's skin came from. When she had asked, Joyce had said something about… having been a little reckless in her youth, but always refused to elaborate, saying that the past had to stay dead.

Her gaze shifted towards her aunt. Even if she knew that Lolly Takahashi was born in California, Elizabeth had always thought of her as 'the aunt from Japan'. She was completely adapted to her new country and to the life in Tokyo, probably to the point that her native country would have felt strange to her. From what the fifteen-year old girl had guessed, this was in good part thanks to the 'coaching' of Aunt Lolly's mother-in-law.

"Mom, I'm going to the arcade," she said after a while.

"Of course dear and…"

"Dawn and I made peace for now, Mom. We didn't want Cel-chan being all pouty at us."

Joyce smiled at her daughter. As the twins grew up, their interests had diverged, Dawn becoming more of a bookworm while Elizabeth hanged with the popular girls of her school and thought about becoming a cheerleader.

_And then those snotty bitches tried to force Buffy to choose between her sister and her school reputation…_

This had almost degenerated in a sisterly war when the summer break started. Joyce remembered Celia's gaze when they welcomed them at the Haneda Airport. The half-Japanese teen had probably noticed the change of mood of her cousins through their regular videoconferences. There had been a discussion between the three girls and things seemed to be better now.

"So… now that we're alone, anego…" said Lolly.

"Hank thinks I don't know, but…"

"Please… In my opinion, you should have married that Taiwanese guy… what was his name?"

"Li Qian-De," said Joyce. "I… I wanted to get away from that world, after it killed Arlene."

Lolly put her hand on her sister's. They both still mourned their big sister and she couldn't really say too much on this issue. She had herself preferred to settle down when love knocked at her door, rather than staying in that world.

"Does Hank know who you were?"

"No."

_- Crown Arcade Café, an hour later -_

Buffy really liked this place that Celia had made them discover a few days ago. It was mostly done to resemble the arcades of the eighties and it had many vintage video games, like the one she was playing to now.

This was not usual for her. Dawn was the gaming girl but this one… it had felt like finding back an old friend. She grinned as the controls of the old Sailor V game moved expertly under her hands, the pixelated magical girl on the screen trouncing through her enemies. Soon, as she progressed through the game, she started to notice another teen near her, looking at the screen of the video game.

"Wow! You're good," said a redhead with green eyes in Japanese. "I never managed to go that far."

"Hope it will last," replied Elizabeth, having learnt the language thanks to her constant chats with her cousin.

The blonde teen managed to pass another level before biting the dust. She sighed as she looked that she was in second position in the memorized high scores. She entered 'Lisa' in the list, wondering who the 'Minako' that was number one on that game was.

"Any idea who she is?" she asked to the redhead.

"Not really. According to the Arcade's manager, the game's high scores were never reset at the owner's request, so it might be here since twenty years or more. But as you have beaten my high score, I have to challenge you," said the redhead while starting a two player versus match.

"Okay… this means war," said Buffy.

"Oh yes… by the way, I'm Kokoa Shuzen."

"Elizabeth Summers, but I usually go by Lisa here in Japan."

On the screen, two magical girls started to exchange attacks while the two teens acted rather roughly with the venerable machine's commands.

"American?"

"Yep, from Los Angeles. My cousin lives here though."

The fought for three full games, Buffy only winning by pure luck on the third match.

"Well… you know what? This place has the best ice cream in the Arcology. So…" said Kokoa.

"I see we have similar tastes."

They both started to walk, reaching the café part of the place. They were soon both seated, each with a big bowl of delicious looking ice cream. They started to talk. It was just regular girl talk but… Elizabeth was realizing that with this almost stranger, she didn't have to watch her mouth as much, to fear that any slip would be used against her later in school. Slowly, she started to talk about school and her problems with her sister.

"It's not really my place to meddle," said Kokoa after a while, "but if I was in your shoes, I would probably have beaten the crap out of those bitches. Your family is more important than them."

"You have sisters too?"

"I'm the youngest of the four Shuzen daughters. We tend to squabble from time to time, but we watch each other's back. Anyone messing with any of my sisters is my enemy."

Elizabeth wondered what kind of life Kokoa had to use so casually words like 'enemy'.

"Think about it: your sister probably thinks that you're betraying her in favor of some bitches that will stab you in the back at the first sign of weakness. If you continue, you will lose her and… the next time it will be even easier to betray someone else… until you're alone and only see others, even your own family, as tools."

The American could feel the bitterness in Kokoa's voice.

_But… she was betrayed by someone dear. Who?_

"I think you're right. I've been an idiot," she said, hacking her ice cream with her spoon. "That's probably the end of my popularity but…"

"As Moka-neesama is fond to say: you don't want popularity, you want respect."

_Neesama? Speak about old school… I feel like if I was speaking to a Maf… could she be a Yakuza daughter?_

"Not sure I…"

"I know what you need: a makeover. You will have a whole new look for the next trimester at school and I just know the perfect place for that."

"Hem, I was supposed to meet my sister and my cousin here."

"Not a problem," said Kokoa, taking out her portable vidphone. "Himiko, locate Lisa-chan's sister and inform her we're going to Arakawa's."

"As you wish, Kokoa," replied an eerie voice on the phone.

Buffy didn't even have the time to protest while the redhead took her hand and dragged her away. As both girls left, a waitress smiled and left her service. Soon, she fiddled with a pen-like object in her hand. The illusion faded, revealing a woman with pink hair arranged in a strange twin ponytail.

"That was funny to arrange," said Usagi. "Yes, definitely a lot funnier than doing it myself under a disguise. A pity I cannot approach Puu-chan, though."

_- Elsewhere in the Arcology, at the same time -_

Dawn was looking at a stone tablet, reading the translation from Sumerian on the interactive tablet visitors could take for their visit in the Setsuna Meiô Art and History Museum. From what she had learnt, the Museum had been founded in memory of a friend of Hotaru Tomoe, who gifted a rather extensive collection of historical artifacts to the billionaire woman.

Suddenly, the display shifted, displaying a 'you have mail' icon. Dawn blinked, and then clicked on it, finding a message indicating that her sister was going to a place called Arakawa.

"Cel-chan…"

"Someone asked Himiko to find you and send you a message. All of the Arcology's inhabitants can do that," replied her cousin, peeking over her shoulder.

"We're… watched?"

"For privacy reasons, the AI will not tell where the recipient is, but she will give the message."

"Right… you know where Arakawa is?"

"Arakawa's is a clothing shop on level eleven. Guess that Lisa-chan could not resist the call of shoes…"

"The message was not sent by her, but by a Kokoa Shuzen… You know her?"

"No, sorry."

They both continued their visit. Over the years, Celia had become Dawn's best friend in addition to being her cousin. She knew very well why. A secret called Sailor Pluto was linking them. Dawn was still incapable to call on her power like she did that night, but she had discovered some things she could do. Mostly, it had to do with her perceptions and time. When looking at artifacts or better, touching them, she could sometimes see things that happened in the past in relation to the item.

_But still no way to do that for the future at this point. _

They both finished their visit and walked to Arakawa's, finding Elizabeth looking at herself in a big mirror while a redhead girl nodded. The dress she was wearing was elegant, yet casual enough to be used at school. It was a far cry from her typical fashion which flirted with the limit their mother had set them with flaunting flesh.

"It's missing something… I know!" said Buffy.

She took a red bow and used it to tie her hair in a high ponytail.

_- Shinjuku, Tokyo, two days later -_

Joyce was taking a stroll. She had been in dire need of some time alone, to clear her head from her marital issues. She didn't wasn't to listen to the dark part of her, the part that told her to drop her unfaithful husband and his floozy in the sea… with concrete shoes. That part also told her something else, something she was more ready to listen to. There were many hosts club in that part of Tokyo where beautiful men would be delighted to attend to her partying needs.

She looked sideways as she passed a house, welcoming the distraction it provided her.

"The Cat's Eye Café has reopened?"

She had a smile, remembering fondly her stays in this coffee house in the early eighties. At the time, she had been sent by her father to attend to some of her family's affairs with… local small businesses. She had enjoyed chatting with the three sisters managing it, as well as listening to some of the police inspectors that were fond of the place because one of them was the fiancé of the middle sister, Hitomi Kisugi. Then, one day, the sisters had closed the coffee shop, moving to California to find their long-lost father.

She hesitated, wondering if the new manager would be a disappointment, then marched on, soon reaching the door. The place was emptier than it had been in the eighties but it still had the same feeling. The only customers were a teenage girl, maybe eighteen or so and probably of Chinese origin, helping a younger teen with ocean blue hair to do her homework.

_Ouch… this girl surely is… precocious,_ she thought, eying the blue-haired teenager's obvious chest. _It's probably not easy at school for her, with the added GES. _

Joyce felt the presence of the barman, a tanned, bald colossus with black shades and stood agape. She knew that man. She remembered quite well when she met him. Suddenly, she wished for something she thought she had left behind a long time ago. Her eyes quickly scanned for anything she could use as a weapon if needed.

"U… Umibozu?"

"It's been long time, Kyrie. Are you here for business?"

"No…"

"Then, will you have a coffee?"

"Yes, I will," she said, as she sat at the bar.

Joyce felt an awareness she had been more than happy to bury come back. The older teen at the table had been watching her, her killing intent rising when she heard her old nickname, then lessening when she sat at the bar. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the teen's position. She was a little more relaxed, but still wary and able to react in less than a second. Joyce felt like crying. She remembered when she had been just like that girl, a tool molded by her asshole father to do… certain tasks.

_Are her hands as stained as mine were at her age?_

Looking at the barman, a man she had met while they were both looking down the barrel of each other's weapon, she noticed some things in the way he moved. It was really subtle, a true testament to the man's mastery of his own body but…

"Umi..."

"I go by Falcon, now… and you?"

"Just Joyce. You're blind, right?"

"Yes. I don't really want to talk about it. From your aura, I guess you left our old world behind you."

"Yes… married, two daughters. When we met, I rather saw myself ending full of lead in some back alley."

"What changed? If you want to talk about it."

"Arlene… Sandfall was killed in Bogota, covering the Don's escape. Our old 'friends' from the Union Teope and… it wasn't pretty. Lolly and I went on a rampage, finishing what Ryo had begun here then we decided we had enough."

"I heard someone say my name…" said a man from the coffee shop's entrance.

Joyce turned. He had aged of course but… he was still the same in so many ways. He still had the same smile, the same mirth in his eyes. She rose and went to hug him… just before she started sobbing.

"Ryo-papa…" asked the eldest of the two teens.

"It's all right, Xiang-Ying," said Ryo, still holding Joyce. "She's an old friend… and yes she is who you think she is."

Joyce caught the appreciative nod of the teen. No doubt that her 'education' had taught her of her youthful deeds.

"Ryo-papa? You?" asked Joyce with a smirk.

"Hem… complicated story," replied the man while, behind the bar, Umibozu sniggered.

"I'm adopted," said Xiang-Ying. "I… had enough too. Kurumu-chan," she added, pointing the blue-haired girl, "on the other hand, is Ryo-papa's biological daughter."

Joyce giggled as she caught her old friend's embarrassment. It seemed like Ryo Saeba's skirt chasing ways had finally caught him. The part of her that had tried so hard to be a proper housewife knew she should have felt angry at his womanizing, particularly with what Hank was doing to her these days.

_But it's different. Ryo chases skirts but doesn't give his word lightly. No promise further than a night of pleasure… while Hank betrayed me._

"I was about to go meet some acquaintances in a club in Kabuki-cho," said Ryo. "You want to tag along?"

She had felt Ryo's hand on her own and the light touch of his fingers on her wedding ring. He had also probably deduced from the way she had hugged him that her marriage was not going well.

_Always so perceptive… despite all the effort you spend to play dumb. _

"Yes… I would like that."

*** Mighty Atom is better known in the West as Astro Boy**


	5. The Last Summer

_Author note: As you have probably guessed if you know the manga, the Rosario+Vampire timeline has been thoroughly affected by Hotaru's existence. The deepest change is a consequence of the battle described in the chapter 3 of this story. Moka was never sealed and therefore does not possess a double personality. This, of course, affected how things happened at Yokai Academy. At the beginning of this chapter (Summer 2012), Tsukune Aono spent/survived his first semester in Yokai Academy but the events were different, as some of it will be shown in this chapter. I'll probably write this alternate Rosario+Vampire as a side story at some point. _

_About portable vidphones: I chose to go with the style of the __Global__ of __Earth: Final Conflict_

_- Apex Arcology, 7 August 2012 -_

Elizabeth was sitting in the subway bringing them back to the Arcology, feeling tired but happy. She, Dawn, Celia and Kokoa had spent the day in Akihabara, overdosing on cuteness and spending some of their savings on various things. She had personally gone with more clothes, continuing in the trend Kokoa had set her up upon. She knew that standing for her sister would make her social circle at school implode. Changing her style would be one more way to tell people she wasn't the same person anymore.

She looked once again at Kokoa. She had to admit that she liked the girl and they both intended to stay in touch after the end of the holidays. She had learnt that Kokoa was from an old and rich family. One would not really have guessed, seeing her in a rather simple plaid sundress with a red and white pattern and reading a manga with a slight smile on her lips. Since their first encounter two days ago, Elizabeth had been going towards a similar style, one that cared more about timeless elegance than 'not being last year'.

_And Mom is actually approving, saying Kokoa has a 'good influence' on me… Well… Satan is probably busy buying ice skating equipment. _

Joyce had left them to their own devices, saying she wanted to take a stroll to think about some things and would come back on her own. The teens had been happy to oblige her and promised to keep their portable vidphones connected.

"What are you thinking about?" asked the redhead.

"When I go back to Los Angeles… when the new school year starts, I will see who my real friends are."

"School year start? Right, America, you start in September instead of April. Just call if you want to speak."

"How come that…"

"We're bonding so fast? I don't have many friends outside of my family… and Ko-chan likes you."

Buffy smiled, remembering her encounter with Kokoa's pet bat. While this certainly wasn't the most common choice for a pet, Elizabeth had just found the bat cute. A part of her had tried to make her admit that this was a certain proof she was joining her sister among the losers, but she had quashed it. She was somehow certain that Kokoa wasn't a 'fair-weather friend'. Once given, her friendship would endure… Elizabeth giggled discreetly.

"You want to share?" asked Kokoa.

"I'm just remembering a dream I had last night. We were both dressed as magical girls, like in the Sailor V game, and fighting side-by-side."

Kokoa raised an eyebrow.

"Well… I would need to train you a lot before that could happen… and I don't feel too keen about fighting is such a short skirt."

For half a second, Elizabeth had the strangest of impressions. Kokoa had to joke, no? Yet, there was something in her tone that… sounded dead serious. A second later, Kokoa winked at her and both girls giggled happily.

They reached the Arcology station and separated as they took elevators to different sectors.

"You really like her," said Dawn.

"Yeah, it's… I don't know, but… I would say that she feels real," said Elizabeth. "I like to see her smile, because… I know it's not faked."

Dawn fought the urge to say something about her sister's rather obvious crush on another girl. If she pointed it out, the risk of seeing Elizabeth backpedaling into her former bitchy self was too great.

_No… just let things play together and… well if she likes girls, that's just all right. And I would rather see her with someone like Kokoa than the idiot jock who's supposed to be her boyfriend. _

Dawn remembered something Celia had told her about the way Kokoa was moving. Celia had practiced aikido since the age of four and she was pretty certain that Kokoa knew how to fight, and probably with a hard style like kempo or Muay Thai. For Dawn, there was also something else. Her talent had shown her a European castle and Kokoa training with a slightly older child with silver hair and strange red eyes.

"We're home!" said Celia as they entered the family flat and removed their shoes in the entrance.

"Did you have a good day?" said Lolly as she came to meet them, folding the screen of her vidphone back in its handle.

The three teens nodded enthusiastically.

"Aunt Lolly?" asked Elizabeth. "Did Mom come back already?"

Lolly Takahashi looked at her niece. She clutched the vidphone in her hand and took a decision she had delayed for too long.

"She met some old friends and is spending the evening with them… Can you three come to the living room once you have put your bags away? We have to talk."

"Sure."

She went back to the kitchen and started to make some tea while the teens went to Celia's room. They would probably need it.

_I know that you want to protect them, anego… but this is a battle they will weather a lot better if they're prepared, and ready to take your side against their father. _

She took the tray with the kettle and the cups and went to the living room. One of the things she liked about living in the Arcology was that the standard flats were a lot less cramped than in the rest of Tokyo. Contrarily to the past years where the Summers had to go to a hotel, she had been able to have her sister and nieces stay with them, Elizabeth and Dawn sleeping on futons with their cousin and Joyce in the guest room.

_The fact that the prick didn't even bother to come this time also helped. _

Lolly sincerely hoped that she would never meet him again. She wasn't sure she would be able to control herself. Hurting her big sister was a capital offense in her book, the kind of offense that made her think about her trusty Walther WA2000. She didn't have the heart to destroy it when they had decided to retire. It was quietly waiting for her in a safe in Honolulu.

_Speaking of my old rifle… Ryo and Umibozu are in Tokyo… More than that: Ryo is the City Hunter. _

She remembered hearing some stories about the City Hunter, stories that sounded like something out the old A-Team show. If you left a message starting with XYZ on the board of the Shinjuku train station, the invincible cleaner would contact you… provided you were pretty woman.

_And with the City Hunter being Ryo, I understand that last point a lot better. _

Her nieces and daughter arrived and the all sat down on the cushions around the coffee table.

"Now that you are all here… first I must tell you that Joyce doesn't know that I will tell you some things… and she probably wouldn't agree. However, I think that we girls have to stick together in such situations."

"It's about Dad, right?" asked Dawn.

"Yes, Dawn-chan, it's about Hank. What do you know?"

"I saw an invoice for a necklace that Mom never got. He could have bought it on behalf of one of his associates, so I didn't say anything until I could have gathered more proof."

Celia looked at her cousin. She had a very good idea on how Dawn knew and that by 'proof' she meant 'proof that don't rely on visions'. She remembered that Dawn told her that her talent to see the past was a pain sometimes, because when it kicked in, she wasn't granted the comfort of lies. She only had the cold, hard truth.

"Dawn," said Elizabeth, who looked very pale, "do you mean that… Dad is…"

"Your father has been cheating on your mother with his secretary for a while now, seven months actually," said Lolly. "Joyce didn't say anything for your sake but she can only take so much crap."

Elizabeth wanted to pretend it wasn't true, that Daddy couldn't… but there were small things nagging her, like how her Dad didn't really look at her Mom anymore. There was also this sadness she could feel in her mother, this feeling that her smiles were faked because something was eating her from the inside.

"Why did you decide to tell us this, auntie?" asked Dawn.

"I know it hurts, Dawn-chan. I know that you mother will be angry at me for telling you. I also know that once the anger has washed out, she will understand that I acted for the good of the family."

"I… I don't see how that can be good for our family."

"I meant us Venturi girls, Elizabeth."

Dawn fought the smile creeping on her lips. This was another secret her talent had revealed her, the day she had borrowed her Mom's old silver cross. She had barely managed not to throw it away that day. The pure darkness, the malevolence surrounding the item was almost a living thing to her new senses, wanting to tell her forbidden secrets, urging her to take her place in the bloodline and carve for herself a path of death.

"What is important," continued Lolly, "is for you to understand that Hank is the traitor here. He could have told your mother months ago that the spark wasn't here anymore and that they needed to do something about it. Instead, he chose to hide it, because giving the illusion of a happy family is important for his career as a lawyer. Joyce discovered it and took upon herself, only confiding in me. As to why I did decide to tell you just now… it's because I want you to understand exactly why your mother has every right to spend the evening with an old friend."

Elizabeth looked at her aunt, hoping to see the hint of a bad joke. Instead… she had those eyes her Mom sometimes had when she was very angry. In those moments, Joyce didn't shout. She spoke with a voice icier than Antarctica and had eyes that promised pain and misery to everything and everyone standing on her path.

"What… what will they do?" asked Buffy.

"I won't lie to you, it will hurt. It already hurt your mother a lot. But your mother will probably ask for divorce in the near future… before she does something she may regret," she said with a curious smile. "What I would like you to do is to support her…"

"But Dad…"

"Sorry, sis," said Dawn, "but I stand with Mom on this. Dad likes you because you're his little princess, the one he can actually show around. Me? I'm not really in his good book, just because some of his clients would leave if they knew he has a 'mutant' daughter. He probably loved us but now… we're tools for him. Don't fool yourself: he will discard you at once if you become a liability."

Elizabeth looked at her sister. She couldn't believe the cold, analytical tone she had just used, the completely cynical and jaded point of view used by…

_Kokoa… that's what Kokoa said: betrayal and how you end up alone, only seeing the others like tools to use and discard. _

"I refuse to become hollow," she whispered as she hugged her sister.

Dawn hugged her back, feeling tears on her cheeks.

_- Saeba family flat, Shinjuku, 8 August 2012, 2:17 AM -_

Xiang-Ying was standing in the living room, hearing noises coming from her father's room, noises that made her blush. She had heard them come back a quarter of an hour ago. They weren't really drunk but rather… horny. Soon, the noises had started.

She knew perfectly well what they were doing and if the circumstances were different, she would probably have clubbed him with the certified 100 tons, anti-pervert hammer she inherited from Kaori the second he entered the flat. Instead, she had just stood in her room, giving them their privacy. This was different from her father's usual flings. She listened to 'her' heartbeats, or rather the one of the heart that beat in her chest, the heart she inherited from Kaori and gave her a new life…

When she was fourteen and one of the most talented assassins of the Zheng Dao Hui under the codename of Glass Heart, she finally had a meltdown and committed suicide, impaling herself on an iron fence. The organization was not about to let one of their best elements die, so they stole a heart and transplanted it to her. Two problems soon arose. The first was that the heart was the one of Kaori Makimura, the late fiancée of Ryo Saeba, the City Hunter. The second, the one that not even Kaori knew about, was that it was the heart of a Yokai.

Her new heart had done wonderful things, like bonding fully with her, negating any need for immunosuppressors. It was also holding a shard of Kaori's soul and started to share memories with her. It was the heart that guided her from Taiwan to Shinjuku and helped her find Ryo… who became her father as Kaori forced her to acknowledge her wish for a family. She had also inherited a little sister with Kurumu… and Xiang-Ying had to admit that she didn't care at all that her little sister was not human. She felt warm and loved in her family.

She went back to her room and sit in front of her dressing table. She needed to 'speak' with her Mom, to put some orders in her feelings.

"Kaori-mama," she said, addressing her reflection in the mirror. "I don't know what to think…"

Her reflection in the mirror blurred, being replaced by the one of a thirty-something woman with short black hair.

"Ryo-papa is in bed with a woman… a woman who… she was like me, but she retired and became a wife and a mother. Now, her husband is cheating on her, treating her like dirt and…"

She listened to something intently.

"I know… it's sad but it can happen. Do you think she and Ryo-Papa… they could be good for each other?"

She watched her mother's face, deciphering her expressions.

"Yeah… the normal life she fought for will end if she does that. She will be sucked back in our world… but, does it really matter?"

She saw her mother's thoughtful face. Kaori had a rather complicated story. An adopted child herself, she worked as a nurse before her brother's murder. She then replaced him as Ryo Saeba's partner and never regretted stepping out of a normal life into this world of shadows and demons. While things were definitely not what most people would call normal, there was love and happiness to be had in this world.

"You think she may try to cling on her normal life because of her daughters…" said Xiang-Ying. "Is it really worth it if they all end up miserable?"

The young woman rested her chin on her hands, musing over a family with the famous Kyrie as a stepmother and two more sisters… She soon fell asleep while, in the mirror, the image of Kaori smiled gently before fading into nothingness.

_- Takahashi family flat, Apex Arcology, 8 August 2012, 5:12 AM -_

Elizabeth was sitting on her aunt's couch, trying to empty her mind completely. She didn't sleep well and, rather than stirring and disturbing her cousin and sister, she had come here, in part to wait for her mother to come back. The sun had already risen for a while and she wasn't back yet.

Not only had she learnt the day before that her Dad was cheating on her Mom, but now, her Mom had gone out for the whole night with 'an old friend': an old, male friend.

Intellectually, she had known that there was probably not much to salvage in her parents' marriage. She had seen some of the signs. She had however hoped that it would pass and that her parents would find it in themselves to love each other again but now… Now, her Mom had spent the night with another man than her father. That probably meant that her mother had no intention to even try to repair anything. That probably meant that her aunt was right and that once they were back in Los Angeles there would be talks of divorce.

_What did auntie say? That if Mom didn't divorce, she would probably reach her breaking point soon and then… then auntie had that scary, almost Joker-like smile… Yeah, like if Mom was Angelina Jolie in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. _

She tried to imagine her mother as an international, top-notch assassin. She just couldn't wrap her mind around that thought. There was no way that an art major who took parenting advice in new age theories could… or could it just be an elaborate lie?

_A lie like the one Dad told us…_

She had tried to call home, only to have to domestic computer telling her he hadn't come home for three days. Another call to her Dad's office, followed by some sweet-talking to an obviously newly-hired intern had taught her that her dad was on vacation, while he had pretexted having too much work to come with them. Deducing the rest was easy.

She took a paper tissue and blew her nose. Before that call, she had somehow still hoped that her aunt and sister were wrong. Now she felt angry at him and she could that voice in her mind whispering that her Mom was right to dump him and find affection where she could.

_What kind of old friend did she meet? Aunt Lolly said he was called Ryo Saeba, but didn't say anything about his job, only that he lived in Shinjuku. _

She forced herself to get up. This morning, Celia had to take them to a place where they could buy yukatas for the festival tonight. Her aunt had been adamant on them not changing that, that they all needed the distraction.

_Kokoa… Kokoa told me to meet her at the festival. Maybe I can speak with her, or at least have a nice evening away from all of this. Right now… Yes, I know. The public baths are opened round the clock since they are mostly manned by androids. Soaking in the rotenburo… _

She gathered her bathing things and left a note on the flat's domestic computer.

_- Saeba family flat, Shinjuku, 8 August 2012, 7:42 AM -_

Joyce woke up, feeling the arms of a man holding her. She basked in that sensation. It had been almost a year since she had felt it for the last time, a year since her husband had started to get colder towards her.

The man holding her knew that kind of loss very well, though not exactly in the same way. Four years ago, his fiancée, Kaori Makimura, had died while saving a child. He had found the strength to continue for his daughters, both the biological one and the adopted one.

_Xiang-Ying… another broken bird._

She didn't want to delve too much on the kind of hellish childhood the teen had gone through. It reminded her too much of her own, of training made to turn her into a faithful attack hound and of an innocence ripped away from her soul far too soon. She just hoped that Xiang-Ying would find the strength to live somewhat normally.

_But what is normal in the end… _

"Ryo?"

"Yes, Ky… Joyce?"

"Thank you for this night. I needed it."

"You're welcome, but…"

"I'm not expecting more than what you already gave, Ryo. It will be hard enough to explain to my daughters."

"He cheated first, you know… Kaori would have beaten me to death with her hammer if I had…"

"By the way, how could she do that trick with the vanishing hammer Ban-ban told me about?" she asked, remembering some anecdotes traded with Ryo's friend the evening before. "Was she… of that world?"

"She didn't know, but probably."

Joyce got up. As a child, she had learnt that two shadow worlds existed on Earth. One was the usual world of crime and other secret, but human, activities. The other was the world of magic and demons. She had also learnt that the frontier between the two was very blurry, that when people of the first reached a certain level, the inevitably peeked into the second. For her, it had been when she was taught to do things like honing her senses to feel killing intent, how to use her chi to reinforce her body or to negate her own aura. These were techniques that most people at her former level knew how to do, techniques that made feats normally reserved to action movies possible. Later, she had learnt why these techniques were known in the criminal world, as an organization bridging both worlds tried to recruit her and her sisters: the Order of Taraka. The mystical assassins had deliberately seeded that knowledge among the crime families, to breed candidates for their order.

_And it was one of the rare times I was glad for Father's influence… If he hadn't intervened, we would have been lured across the border and been swallowed for good._

She started to dress up, slowly. She felt Ryo's gaze on her body and it was too damningly good to feel desired again. She could feel the darkness in her whispering things to her soul, telling her to dump her piece of trash of a husband in the most humiliating way possible, to destroy him completely. She also heard her rather sloshed conscience try to tell her to think about her daughters. She sighed.

"For years," she said, "I buried a part of myself to become a proper little housewife. At one point, I even took medication to dull my combat reflexes and pretend to be… what society considers normal. Later, raising my daughters helped me to maintain the mask."

"But now, you feel it cracking and this long buried part of yourself is awakening, because your 'normal' life is falling apart."

"What should I do, Ryo? Should I bury it again?"

"I'm probably not the best person to give you advice, Joyce... I never left that world."

"No, but you're standing nearer to the frontier than you used to."

"True…"

He got up and came to hug her. His embrace felt warm and caring. The darkness was trying something different, whispering to her that this was a man that would accept her in her entirety, that he would allow her to be herself instead of that pathetic mask she had to don to marry Hank. Her conscience counter-attacked, asking her if she wanted to draw her daughters in that world.

_No or… no, I cannot do that to them. They deserve a chance to be normal. _

"When the Kill Bill movie got out… it felt like a flashback to me. When Bill shot the Bride with the truth serum and asked her those things, it was like if I heard myself…"

"What did you do?"

"I drowned that feeling with tequila… not my most glorious moment."

"Ryo-papa, are you up?" asked Xiang-Ying from the other side of the door. "Kurumu says that breakfast is ready."

"I suppose that here go my chances to leave discreetly," said Joyce.

"You never had one," he said while putting on a t-shirt.

"I'll give a call to my daughters and I'll come join you."

_- Takahashi family flat, Shinjuku, 8 August 2012, 8:02 AM -_

Dawn unfolded the screen of her vidphone and took the call.

"Hello, Mom," she said, looking at the rather embarrassed face of her mother.

"Hello Dawn. Is Elizabeth here?"

"She went to the baths three hours ago and then messaged she was taking a stroll on the Arcology's Outer Promenade. She has left her vidphone here but I can message her through the intranet if you wish."

"This early? That's unusual."

"Mom… Aunt Lolly told us about Dad."

On the screen, Joyce pinched the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes.

"I… I'll have some words with my sister…"

"Mom… it's better like this."

"Maybe… but it's the matter of her doing it without consulting me. I'll be…"

"Mom, sorry to contradict you, but please, take your time. Have breakfast wherever you are so that you can cool down. We'll discuss at length before lunch."

Joyce shook her head and smiled at her daughter.

"How come you are always so reasonable?"

"You always told me that acting rashly was a bad idea..."

"True… I love you, daughter. I will be back soon."

_- Saeba family flat, Shinjuku, 8 August 2012 8:13 AM -_

Joyce felt pretty awkward as she sat around the bar separating the kitchen and the living room with Ryo and his two daughters.

"Bon appétit," said Kurumu with a big smile.

She sat and started to eat, finding the acceptance they had of the situation almost surreal.

"Hem… sorry to ask this," said Joyce. "But… you…"

"Well… you're different from the girls Ryo-papa tends to have a crush on… first you're not a civilian, but Kyrie," said Xiang-Ying. "It's not like you cannot defend yourself. Second, Kaori-mama told me that you needed… that," she finished with a blush.

Joyce felt rather conflicted. It was not only the fact that this teen seemed to consider her like… someone more 'normal' would for his favorite baseball player but also the fact Kaori was supposed to be dead.

_Could it be…_

"When Kaori-mama died, I was transplanted her heart," said Xiang-Ying. "Ryo-papa adopted me only later. Sometimes… I can speak with her."

Joyce surprised a gaze between Kurumu and her father, who responded with a slight nod.

"What neechan is trying to say is that there is a shard of Kaori's soul clinging to her heart," said Kurumu. "It's not a full possession, rather a kind of guardian angel."

"Are you a witch, Kurumu-chan?"

The blue-haired teen shook her head with a smile while devilish wings sprung out of her back.

"I'm a succubus," she said.

_Of course, a seducer like Ryo was bound to meet sex demons…_

"Ryo… the love hotels in Kabuki-cho?"

"Some… mostly Succubae and Kitsune," replied the City Hunter. "When Xiang-Ying came here four years ago, there was a power play between the leaders of the Zheng Dao Hui. The boss trying to do a coup had a very nasty surprise when he deployed soldiers in Kabuki-cho."

They ate calmly for a while.

"Tonight, there is the festival at the Apex Arcology. Would you like to come with Kurumu and Xiang-Ying? I would like Elizabeth and Dawn to meet my old friend."

"I would probably tell you something about bad ideas if we weren't already going. Kurumu wants me to meet her friends from school."

_- Apex Arcology, 8 August 2012, 10:24 AM -_

"You don't need one, Cel-chan?" asked Dawn.

"Nope. I work as a miko for the Arcology's shrine, so I'll be in uniform tonight."

Dawn nodded. A traditional festival had to be sponsored by the local shrine, particularly for an occasion that was, in the end, the anniversary of the founding of that town called the Sankakusu Arcology. That meant that her cousin would spend the evening being a priestess, a role that she had often said she was oddly comfortable with.

A few feet from here, Elizabeth was looking at herself in the mirror. She loved how the light blue kimono looked on her, with its motif of shells and rolling waves, while Dawn had gone for a garnet one with black dragons.

"Dawn-chan… It suits you but if Takayama-san sees you like this, she will probably try to exorcise you," said Celia with a grin.

"She's the head priestess at the shrine?"

"Yes. She was formed at the Hikawa Shrine… it's very old, very respected and the family that used to cater to it was known for its shamans able to read the shrine's sacred fire."

"Used to?" asked Elizabeth. "What happened?"

"The last daughter of the family died in the eighties, leaving only her old grandfather. Another family had to step in, though Hino-san taught until his death. Takayama-san was one of his last students."

_- Takahashi family flat, Apex Arcology, 8 January, 11:04 -_

They were once again all sitting around the living room table, but this time the gaze of the three teenagers were turned towards Joyce.

"So…" said finally Joyce, breaking the awkward silence. "I agree that last night was not my wisest decision but I do not regret it in the slightest."

"Why?" asked Elizabeth. "By doing that…"

"You feel like if I'm no better than Hank, right? Buf…"

"Please," said Elizabeth, with suddenly hard eyes. "I'm trying very hard to be angry at d… father."

"Very well, Elizabeth, I will never call you by his nickname again. During the last months, I gave your father many hints and occasions to redeem himself or even to simply admit he was cheating on me. He took none of them, even when it was blatant. When we left for Japan, I knew there was a good chance he would take the opportunity to take a vacation of his own. When we left, the only thing missing to our separation was an official statement I refused to give him for your and your sister's sake. Meeting some old friends just gave me the push I needed."

"By friend… you mean an old boyfriend?" asked Dawn.

Joyce had a dreamy smile as her sight unfocused for an instant.

"Hem… I… I never thought I would talk about those kinds of things with you but Ryo is not a former boyfriend. I think you would call him… a friend with benefits."

Elizabeth looked at her mother like if she had just declared she was a Venusian. The idea of her mother having sex was disturbing enough but… that? It was something she had thought reserved to shows like _Sex and the City. _

"Okay…" said Dawn. "While Lisa-chan is recuperating, when can we meet him?"

"Ryo will be here tonight with his daughters… and before you ask: he's a widower and I never had… that kind of relations with him before last night. I don't think things will ever go further with him... at least not until the divorce papers are signed."

"So," said Elizabeth, sniffing, "that's it?"

"Yes, Lisa-chan, that's it. Staying with Hank will only make me suffer. It would also make you suffer now that you know. Dawn…"

"What?" asked the green-haired teen with an innocent smile.

"I know that gaze. When your aunt Arlene had it, people were about to see hell. What are you planning?"

"Hem… a vendetta?"

"We're Corsicans, not Italians, dear," said Lolly. "Not that it changes much in that area, though."

_- Apex Arcology, during the evening -_

Kokoa Shuzen looked at her new friend. She could feel that something was wrong, though she didn't know exactly what. It wasn't her relations with her sister as they seemed to be a lot better.

"Are you all right?"

"Sorry… I didn't want to be such a party pooper."

"You want to talk about it?"

Elizabeth nodded and Kokoa took her in a remote part of the park, away from the festival itself. They soon sat on a bench facing the sea.

"My parents… they're about to divorce," said Elizabeth, barely holding back her tears.

"Why?"

"D… my father has been cheating and lying to Mom for months. He also lied to us… when I tried to call him last night; he was on vacation when he was supposed to be too busy with work to come here with us."

Kokoa quickly sorted out in her mind what she could actually tell to her friend. Akua had come to her with a dossier called Kyrie that concerned the past of Elizabeth's mother. She had been impressed by the career of that woman and a human able to impress Akua had to be very, very scary.

"Where do you stand in all of that?"

"With Mom… At least, I'm sure she loves me even if… I don't really know who she is anymore. With father… I know who he is. I know that to him I'm just a trophy to show around so that he can look good."

"I… well my situation was different, but my parents divorced too. My mother betrayed our family. To her, we were only pawns in the clan politics. Father banished her and married Akasha-kaasama."

"Kokoa… Isn't Akasha Moka's mother and…"

"Akasha-kaasama was my father's official mistress… as you can guess, we're a little old-fashioned."

"Old as in Sengoku era old-fashioned?"

"Sometimes…" said Kokoa, holding Elizabeth's hand. "Our family is old… the first Shuzen settled in Japan when Qin Shi Huangdi was busy unifying China. Father and Akasha-kaasama have rather strict ideas on honor."

Kokoa looked at Elizabeth. She seemed so fragile now… yet she could feel vast reservoirs of untapped, inner strength, a strength that just lacked the proper nudge to rise at the surface. She also smelled wonderfully good and she was betting that her blood would be a pure delight.

_A pity she's going back to America in only two days… _

She leaned against her, putting her arm around her friend's shoulder, struggling against the instinct that told her to taste her.

Elizabeth blushed as she felt Kokoa holding her. Her grip was strong, a lot stronger than Jeffrey's and she had to admit that she felt at ease with the Japanese redhead. She relaxed as they leaned against each other. Soon, the first fireworks illuminated the bay in front of them.

In the shadows, Xiang-Ying and Akua looked at each other, before going back to the festival area.

"You see, no need to have fear, Glass Heart," said Akua. "My little sister has manners."

"You're one to tell, Black Devil," replied the Taiwanese girl.

The two former assassins smiled at each other, in a way that would probably have sent shivers down the spine of a shark.

_- Los Angeles, 4 September 2012 -_

The Slayer essence was busy settling into her new host, permeating her cells to enhance her capabilities. This host had a lot of potential and she would… the Slayer stopped. There was something unusual with this host.

Sometimes, she had hosts that had traces of demonic blood, but this was different. There was something attached to her host's soul. The Slayer concentrated, forcing the materialization of the mindscape she would sometimes use to communicate with her host.

She blinked as the mindscape wasn't the usual arid savannah, but a lush jungle with tall trees and mountains that pierced the canopy. Even more, there was a city made of graceful crystal and pink marble aeries built on the mountains. She was standing on large balcony, scratching her head, wondering what was powerful enough…

She knew. It could only be this. Below her stood a fountain and, floating above it, a complex red gold crystal.

"Shiny star… new host has shiny star seed in her soul."

The Slayer essence bathed in the crystal's light, feeling warm for the first time in millennia.

_- Los Angeles, 6 September 2012 -_

Elizabeth sat under a tree in the park near the flat she was now sharing with her Mom and her sister. Since they had come back from Japan, things had gone fast. Her mother had actually cornered Hank telling him they could have an agreement for the divorce: he renounced to his daughters' guard and she let him keep the house and the money. Other than that, he could risk going before the judge, with all the potential damage it could do for his career. The fact Hank didn't even try to fight for them had reduced in bitter ashes what little love Elizabeth still had for her father.

After that, they had quickly moved out, her Mom renting a comfortable flat for the three of them while she settled some things down. Her Mom didn't seem really fazed by any money problem. She had heard her phone to people, speaking French with a curious accent. That reinforced more and more she and Dawn's theory about her Mom being of… a certain kind of family. Dawn was thinking about the Unione Corse.

_And there are those nightmares about girls killed by monsters… At least they fight back, even if they lose. Not like me… _

Dawn and her still attended the same school, but she wondered more and more if immigrating to Japan wouldn't be a good idea. Jeffrey had dumped her at the same time as her so-called friends. She just felt that fighting for getting any of it back would… just not be worth it. At least, Dawn's own nerdy social circle had welcomed her but…

"Meow!"

Elizabeth raised her head, watching the small shape that was brushing against her legs. It was a white cat, with big blue eyes and a funny golden, crescent-shaped mark on his brow. She dried her tears.

"I don't think I have anything for you, you know."

The cat installed himself on her lap, purring with application.

"You look thin. You don't have a home?"

The cat didn't reply but she noticed an old collar around his neck. It seemed almost too small. Carefully, she removed it and thanked the fact the cat remained still during the whole operation.

There was a name on a rusty plate on the collar. She brushed it slightly, deciphering the characters.

"Ar…te…mis."

She raised the cat before her eyes, verifying an impression she had since meeting the animal.

"Sorry, I just wanted to check," she said as she put him back on her lap, where he curled comfortable, resuming his purring. "How come you were given a girl's name? We should find you something else…"

The cat turned his head and she was almost sure there was intelligence in his eyes. It was like if he was saying to her: 'I don't care if a girl wore my name'.

"Okay… I'll take that as a no, Artemis. You're a fun one, you know…"

She stroked his fur. It felt oddly familiar, even though she never had a cat. Her father had been allergic.

_Just one more reason to take him home… _

"At least you cats don't have couple issues…"

The cat had a little cough, as if he had slightly choked on something.

"You have a hairball?"

Artemis just resumed his purring. Elizabeth got up, taking him in her arms. Taking care of a cat was just what she needed to change her mind. She got back to the flat, finding her Mom in the kitchen, reading the paper on her computer tablet.

"You found a stray?" asked Joyce.

"He's called Artemis," she said, giving the collar to her Mom. "May I… keep him?"

"If he had a collar, he probably… well, it's old, probably several months from the corrosion. I don't see why not. I'll bring him to the vet tomorrow to make sure he has his shots."

Elizabeth felt the cat shiver in her arms.

"Mom… you're not going to…"

"No, I'm not going to have him fixed, as long as he behaves."

The cat purred in the teen's arms.

"It's funny… it's like if he understands everything we say."

"Who knows… maybe he's a magical cat. With that moon crescent, he sure looks a little witchy."

_- Elsewhere in Los Angeles, at the same time -_

Merrick Jamison-Smythe got down from his cab. All the oracles were clear, the new Slayer had been called and she was in this neighborhood. She wasn't one that the Council had raised but a normal teenager who had probably little to do with a destiny.

_I'm sorry to have to pull the wool from over your eyes, child… but there is no one else. _

He looked at the newspaper's first page announcing another victim from a serial killer who left his victims bloodless. He hoped he would have the time to train his new charge at least a little before trouble found her. Trouble always found the Slayer.


	6. The Calling (Part I)

_Author notes:_

_- While some movies of the 21__st__ century we know about are cited in this story, they are themselves alternate versions. The difference lies in what the people on the Earth of this story consider as realistic and the fact their world map is different from ours. Let's take a typical example with one movie I cited: Mr. and Mrs. Smith. The concept and the main story stay the same: two elite assassins married to each other and believing the other to be normal until everything goes south. What changes is that the high-tech equipment they use is high-tech… according to the standards of their world instead of ours. Both of them are therefore cyborgs with camouflaged implants. Likewise, the battle in the mall at the end included combat robots that Jane Smith hacked using her cyber-brain, turning them against their attackers. _

_- On another point, the date of birth of some characters has been moved up by 16 years to match the 1996 to 2012 'base year move'_

_- Elizabeth's room, Los Angeles, 7 September 2012 22:17 (Tokyo, 8 September 15:17) -_

"It's a pity we cannot talk more often…" said Elizabeth.

"The problem of time zones… Guess it's the same for Dawn when she wants to talk to Celia."

She looked at the screen of her laptop and at the image of Kokoa on it. The redhead was sitting on the couch of a living room whose walls were almost covered with exotic hand-to-hand weapons, including a few swords that looked right out of a Final Fantasy game, a mug of something hot in her hands.

From what Lisa had learnt in their previous calls, the living room was actually hers, a part of her apartment in the family compound. But the décor was secondary to her. Her eyes was always drawn back to her friend. Like her, Kokoa was rather petite and they had joked about waiting for the next growth spurt.

Elizabeth had however managed to convince her to change her hairstyle, abandoning the double ponytail that made her look more childish in favor of free-flowing curls. She blushed as Kokoa moved on the couch to put her empty mug on the coffee table, revealing maybe just a little too much of what was under her tank top.

"Kokoa… do you have a boyfriend?"

"No… it's not that I'm not interested in finding someone but… problems on your side?"

"I'll just say you were right. Mister Jerk decided last Monday he couldn't be seen with an unpopular girl…"

"What did you do?"

"I hesitated to kick him in the nuts but… I felt he just wasn't worth the detention I would get for it."

"Did he do in public or private?"

"Private… I have to admit that he had at least the decency to do it in private and face to face."

"Poor reasons, decent execution… Ignore him. He is not worthy of you."

Elizabeth blushed again. There was something in Kokoa's tone, something that gave the blonde teen the impression of an unvoiced 'for only I am'. There was something in that girl that just made her feel…

"I think that you might want to change schools at some point," continued the redhead, cutting through Lisa's thoughts.

"Mom is thinking about moving… I would like to go to Japan but…"

"Yeah, not necessarily easy for your kaasan to find a job in Tokyo or for you to adapt…"

"Well… Mom seems to like that Ryo guy."

Kokoa sighed, then started to manipulate some controls on her computer.

"Lisa-chan, I'm sending to your computer a ciphering software. The keys will come with an encrypted email whose key is the name of the high score holder on the Sailor V machine."

"Wow… why the spy… understood, I install that software and we can talk more freely. I'll call you back in five."

She cut the communication and started to install the software. As a child, he had been quite skillful on computer stuff as it was part of a common childhood dream for her generation: working in space, perhaps even being on the crew of the first mission to Jupiter.

She realized now that a good part of the shallow, popular girl she had been had been caused by her desire to please her father. Hank Summers had definite ideas on what a girl should be and proficient with technology wasn't one of them. The whole ice skating thing had been his idea of a decent girl activity after all.

Since the beginning of the school year, since she had begun to not care about being popular anymore, her grades had started to rise again and she had started to think again about that dream of going into space. While she was still a little embarrassed to admit it, she was learning to like math and physics again thanks to Dawn's nerd friends.

"Here… all set, now the email… Minako."

She called again, watching the ciphering protocol put itself in place in a corner of her screen.

"Looks like the channel is secured, Kokoa."

"Good… sorry about this, but there are some things I wouldn't like the American intelligence services to catch."

A month ago, Elizabeth would have dismissed this as some kind of prank or conspiracy craziness. With the clues about her mother's past decidedly not being normal piling up however…

"Is Ryo a spy?"

"A former mercenary according to what Akua-neesan told me. Now he is the City Hunter."

"Sounds like a superhero name…"

"In a way… you're right," said Kokoa with a smile. "But what he's doing… there was an old American show called the A-Team."

"I saw the movie… a date with Jeffrey. So he's helping people?"

"Yes but what he is doing is often not really legal as you can guess. Have you already heard about Joy Law?"

"The action movie star? Yes, Celia told me the promotion tour in Japan for her last movie was… a little rough."

"That's one way to put it… Xiang-Ying was actually replacing Joy Law as she was targeted by one of the political factions of her home country because she was one of the royal mistresses."

"I think I heard about that on the news. Wasn't the king a double?"

"Yes and the faction that replaced the king didn't want her to blurt out. The City Hunter was hired to protect her."

"But… isn't Xiang-Ying only nineteen?"

"Have you seen an anime called Noir?"

"No, sorry."

"A pity… you might want to check it. Xiang-Ying is trained to a degree, she can do things most people think are reserved to mangas…"

"Kokoa… and Mom? I have more and more the impression she's of the same species as that Saeba guy."

Elizabeth saw the look on her friend and guessed what was happening. Kokoa knew the truth and had probably promised not to tell. Knowing how big the Shuzen girl was about sticking to her word…

"You gave your word, right?"

"Yes, sorry. Xiang-Ying asked me to let your mother decide when she will tell you about it."

"That's all right… I know how important it is for you and it's one of the things I really like in you… I'll ask Mom directly. Good evening, Kokoa-chan."

"Good night, Lisa-chan."

_- Apex Arcology, Tokyo, at the same time -_

Kokoa closed her eyes as the communication shut.

"Thank Kali, I couldn't smell her…"

She got up and talked the halls of the Residence, soon reaching the library. Just as she had thought, the person she wanted to see was there, reading in one of the armchairs near the windows. Kokoa sat in a nearby seat.

"Akasha-kaasama?"

"Yes, Kokoa-chan?"

"How… Do you remember Elizabeth?"

"The blonde girl during the festival? Yes, I remember her. I must say I am happy to see you making friends."

"It… I don't know what to think. When I see her cry, I want to slaughter whoever did it to her. When I see her smile, I feel…"

"Like you can hear her every heartbeat and want nothing more than taste her?"

Kokoa nodded, while Akasha smiled benevolently at her.

"Could it be that… I don't know, stories rather speak about…"

"Butterflies in the stomach?"

Akasha smiled as she saw her stepdaughter blush.

"You know as well as me that our physiology is different from the one of humans. For one, we don't have periods like human women do."

"Yeah… I remember what you taught us: our control over our own body is so great that we actually will ourselves to… be fertile when we want a baby."

There was also the unsaid reason that both of them understood. The bleeding that came with periods was just out of question for a species aroused by the scent of blood.

"Some signs are therefore also different for us. Blood… it's always about the blood. When we look for a boyfriend or a girlfriend… wanting to share blood with him or her is a sure sign of desire."

Kokoa played with one of her curls as she nodded dreamily, thinking about that day in Akihabara, with the sun playing on Lisa's fair skin, making her magnificent hair look like strands of gold… and framing so nicely her pretty neck. Her stepmother was right, it was always about blood. It had also been it for her sister Moka, the taste of Tsukune's blood on her lips triggering the events that finally led her to be engaged to him.

"But… she's a girl… I… won't Father…"

"Hotaru-san once told me that in the old days, vampires looked for certain qualities in a mate and that gender was… secondary. It is only because we are so few now that having children became more important. But now that Hotaru-san is back, things are different. If she makes you happy, Kokoa-chan, I think that no one in the clan, your father included, will object. If things go all right between you… I think you should offer to sire her."

Kokoa had a deep blush. While ghouls reproduced like the vermin they were, turning a human into a true vampire was a rare occurrence. It was a very intimate process, as the vampire repeatedly shared his lifeforce with the childe, often as part of the act of lovemaking. Before Hotaru-sama gave them back the secret of amrita, it had also been risky. The transfusion was often imperfect and the childe degenerated in a soulless ghoul.

She bit her finger, soon feeling the taste of her own blood. The idea of kissing and tasting Elizabeth was driving her mad. She felt her stepmother's hand on hers, taking it away from her mouth and giving it a lick to help the bite mark to regenerate. Their blood was too precious to be wiped out by a mere rag.

"I… but what if she doesn't like me that way? I don't want to…"

"Then she'll still be your friend, Kokoa-chan. Just don't rush things. You both have time. If she feels the same way, things will develop naturally. On the other hand… I'll talk to your father. I think it would be good for you to broaden your horizons… maybe as an exchange student in California?"

Kokoa hugged her stepmother.

_- Los Angeles, an hour later -_

Artemis slipped out of Elizabeth's room, letting her sleep. He passed the one of Dawn, seeing her on her computer. From the look of the webpage she was on, she was busy collating information.

_Some things never change…_

He sighed as he was about to enter Joyce's room. What he was about to do was decidedly not the usual procedure but… he phased through the door and saw Joyce kneeling, eyes shut, the pieces of a dismantled pistol around her. Her hands started to move like a blur. It wasn't haste. Each move was perfectly precise, fetching every piece without the slightest hesitation and assembling them.

_She's not particularly discreet about it… Here we go…_

"Hem… Joyce?"

A swift move, a click and barely a second for the charged and cocked pistol to be pointed straight at his head.

_She's only slightly less trigger-happy than Uranus… _

"I wondered when you would make your move, bakeneko," said Joyce. "So… as it seems you can talk, start telling me what you're doing here."

_She thinks I'm a Yokai… will make things both simpler for her to believe me and harder for her to trust me._

"Well… My name is really Artemis and I'm indeed a magical cat. However, I was born like this and I'm quite happy with having only one tail. In fact, I'm more a cousin to the foo dogs."

"Guardian spirit then… which means two things. First, where is your mate, as Foo Dogs always go in pairs, and second, what are you guarding?"

"I don't know where Luna is. Like me, she has probably found her way to another of our charges, probably the Princess Serenity as her bond with her is the strongest, just as mine is with… Elizabeth."

"This is starting to sound like one of those stories with a lot of prophecies… I don't like them."

"Well… my former mistress thought that prophecies were boxes created by petty people who wanted to imprison the future… the reasons I'm here have consequences on the future, but they find their roots in the past… To deliver news that will probably please you a lot: Hank Summers is not your daughters' biological father."

"If you dare to tell me that you're a Cat from Outer Space and that I was abducted…"

"Hem…" said Artemis, looking at his tail. "I used to live on Venus so technically… please, don't shoot!" he added quickly as he could see her finger move on the trigger. "No abduction. Reincarnation spell. The spell finds a suitable woman and implant the fetuses, genetic material of the previous incarnation playing the 'father' role. The reason why Dawn and Elizabeth were implanted together is because they were twins in their original life."

Joyce frowned. Because of Dawn's obvious GES, genetic tests had been done on both of her daughters when they were born, but it was true that none was done in comparison to Hank's genome. The doctors had been more interested in comparing the twins' DNA and see how Dawn's deviated from the one of her sister.

"So, you were sent to protect them?"

"Rather advise them. Normally, with this spell, the powers of their former life should awake soon..."

"Let's admit I believe you. This kind of magic is very powerful and its goal rather obvious. When will their former lives take over?"

"They… impossible to say. Memories will leak sooner or later, maybe already started as dreams. How much they can stay their own person or will be overwhelmed by the past… there are just too many unknowns. What I know for sure is that if they're left alone, if they are not prepared, the probabilities are a lot higher of them becoming who they once were, because it will be the only way for them to control it."

"Next question: why telling me? I know how you magical people think. You don't think mundanes should be in the know."

"Because you're a warrior. You may have buried it all of those years, but it's in your blood. I… weighed the pros and cons and putting you directly in the know was the scenario that had the best chance to end without bullet holes in my fur."

"Except I could decide to get rid of you to protect my daughters."

"You could, but… I would have liked to have more than 48 hours to observe and take a decision but what I sensed in Elizabeth… it cannot wait, so I decided to trust you."

"What happened? Is she awakening sooner than expected?"

"No… Dawn already has access to a little of her magic, so the issue would rather be her in that case. There is a second lifeforce clutching to Elizabeth's."

Joyce frowned again. Her senses were still rusty but it was true that there has been something off with Elizabeth those last days. She had attributed the small spikes of killing intent to her problems with her former 'school friends'.

_But those same problems would leave her vulnerable to possession._

"What is it doing? Leeching her energy? Taking over?"

"Maybe the latter… It seems to act like a symbiont but… I don't know what it is. I fear its interaction with the magic of her past incarnation."

Joyce uncocked the pistol and lowered her arm.

"What you're telling me is coherent with some things I had seen, but not paid enough attention to. So let's say I believe you, for now. What about my daughters' past incarnations?"

"Have you ever heard of Sailor V?"

"Maybe. Tell me more."

"Sailor V's civilian identity was Minako Aino, a Japanese girl living in Britain at the time I found her. I… an organization called the Dark Agency was starting to gain power and someone had to fight them. I helped her train and master her magic."

"If Elizabeth is here, then how did Minako die?"

"A battle with her fellow Sailor Senshi, in 1985… It didn't happen on Earth. They won, but… I was killed too so I'm not sure what exactly happened and my own memories are full of holes. What I know is that I and the others were reincarnated. I think Sailor Saturn managed to survive the battle, but I don't remember her civilian identity."

"Sailor V… V stands for Venus, correct?"

"Yes… that's not her first name. Elizabeth is her third incarnation. The first one… she was called Ishtar then. My memories are… better than they used to be, but still…"

"Ishtar… a Babylonian goddess: or rather someone, an alien the Babylonians worshipped as a goddess, correct?"

"Mostly. Uruk, I mean the planet Venus… it wasn't always the hell it is now. I remember the warm seas full of delicious fish, the deep jungles and the people. I remember the towers of Esagila. After Skyfall, what the Bible calls the Flood, the survivors came here and told stories."

_Gosh… I'm too rusty. I used to be able to read auras before… I don't think he's lying but… No more choice. With the weirdness coming, for the sake of my daughters, I must… _

"Tomorrow morning, you'll talk to my daughters. If what you say is true, I will need to… let 'her' in again."

_- Meanwhile, in Elizabeth's head -_

The Slayer Essence watched as her host was sleeping. It was time for her to start another dream, to make her see the fate of another of her past hosts. She concentrated, sending the memory along the link she had with her host's soul.

Suddenly, the crystal star over the fountain flared. Tendrils of golden light sprung out of its surface, searching something. The Slayer Essence hissed as they neared and she ran away, but it was already too late. This host wasn't normal and she wasn't in control of the mindscape. The glowing tentacles were already holding her and another was rising in front of her, its spear-shaped end opening like a flower that stuck to her brow.

She screamed, more of rage than of pain, as her memories were scanned one by one. Suddenly, all the tendrils retreated, twisting and merging near the fountain to form… a silhouette of golden light. It was a woman in ethereal veils, with six feathery wings, a tail and seven horns on her head. She looked at the Slayer Essence with… pity?

"Poor child… to see you like this… Have faith. Auntie Ishtar will find something. Remember your name, the one the mages took away," she said before retreating in the crystal.

The voice of the woman… the Slayer Essence knew she had heard it before. The crystal continued to flare, feeding images in the link the Slayer Essence had been using to send a dream to her host. The Essence frowned then shrugged. It wasn't exactly the dream she had wanted to show, but it was similar enough for her not to care.

_- Elizabeth's room, Los Angeles, 8 September 2012 7:05 -_

"And another one…" said Elizabeth as she woke up. "This one was a little different though… you don't know anything about dreams, Artemis?" she added, pushing a little the cat that slept at the bottom of her bed.

She started to tell her dream to Artemis, where she was a girl called Xin Rong in China, at a time she thought was the beginning of the twentieth century.

"… well it was a lot like the other dreams, as the girl fights those monsters with yellow eyes and funny brows ridges… you know that they burn in sunlight like in the old Dracula movies? I saw that in another dream. Anyway, there were four of them, two men and two women. She had managed to wound one of the men on the face, but she had taken a mortal wound herself. That's when it becomes funny. Suddenly, Kokoa's Dad destroys the doors of the temple the girl was fighting in with a kick and attacks the four monsters… He calls them ghouls and trash and… the monsters are getting their ass sooo kicked. A pity they managed to flee when that cannonball broke the roof. Anyway, the last thing is that he was holding the girl, telling her he was sorry, but that her family was safe. I remember his eyes, his scarlet eyes… If he's a vampire, at least he's the real thing, not like those Halloween rejects. That's when I woke up. So, what do you think?"

"I think that you should tell your mother about that dream, Elizabeth," replied the cat.

"Okay… still dreaming. Next thing I know, I will be waving a wand saying corny things about love and justice while wearing some kind of cosplaying outfit…"

She got up and went to take a shower, not really seeing the embarrassment on Artemis' face. Thirty seconds later, she stormed back in the room and lifted the cat by his neck's skin.

"You! I'm not dreaming! You really talked!"

"Yes, Elizabeth, I can talk and… yes, you are a magical girl."

Artemis meowed as he saw her eyes roll as she fell on the ground. He extracted himself from her grip, just in time not to end under her unconscious body. He approached her face and gave a light tap of one of his paws on her cheek.

"This is gonna be a long day," he said, sighing.

- _Venturi family flat, Los Angeles, 8 September 2012 8:32_ -

Elizabeth was still hoping she was somehow dreaming while she, Dawn and her Mom listened to… a goddamned magical cat explaining them they were the reincarnations of princesses from Atlantis or something like that. She took a sip of her hot cocoa.

"… and that's what I can tell you for now," said Artemis.

"Dawn, Lisa, do you have anything to tell us?" asked Joyce.

Dawn took a deep breath.

"What Artemis says is at least somewhat correct," said Dawn. "I've known about being Sailor Pluto for years. It has all started when Celia and I had to spend the night at the hospital… there was a creature sucking the life energy of the children… I called it a youma and I destroyed it using a spell called 'Dead Scream'. I thought I had dreamt… until Celia told me she made the same dream. Since then, Celia and I have been looking for clues but without any more success than a few rumors and urban legends. I… can also do a thing called psychometry."

"Psycho…what?" asked Elizabeth.

"Psychometry," said Joyce. "It's a form of ESP where someone picks up impressions of events happening near a given item… I guess that explains your stellar grades in history."

"In part… Mom, your old silver cross…"

Joyce winced, knowing perfectly well what this item went through over the years.

"I'll tell you about it... Elizabeth?"

"Since a few nights ago, I have dreams," replied the blonde teen. "I see girls around my age… they fight against monsters with yellow eyes, fangs and funny brows… they always die at the end."

"Vampires," said Joyce. "Again, I'll explain later."

"Actually Mom, I think there are two kinds of vampires, one with yellow eyes and the other with red eyes. In my last dream… I saw a vampire with red eyes and pupils like a cat. He called the other kind, the one with dead, yellow eyes, ghouls and trash."

She kept for herself the fact her dream had put the face of Kokoa's dad on this super-vampire. The dream might be wrong and she wanted to believe her friend.

"That was a Raksha," said Artemis, "A Saturnian."

"Ally or enemy?" asked Joyce.

"In the dream, the… 'red eyes' helped the girl but he arrived too late. He was… I mean he was nothing like the ye… nothing like the ghouls. He was like that French actor chasing the thugs away in that swashbuckling movie you showed us last Thursday," said Elizabeth.

Joyce had a bemused smile. She had started to teach her native French to her daughters, among other things by showing them subtitled French movies to get them used to the sounds. The movie Elizabeth was referring to was _Le Bossu, _the old version with Bourvil and Jean Marais. She had even surprised Lisa mimicking the fencing moves with a ruler, as well as looking for fencing and kendo clubs in the area.

"Artemis, anything to add?" asked Dawn.

"I'm not sure. It's not a question of memories, but because it happened long before I was born. When I was the advisor of Elizabeth's initial incarnation, Saturn had been quarantined for centuries and the subject was not spoken about. What I also remember is that, in the second incarnation, Sailor Saturn was an ally, though there was a certain fear of what she could do…"

"Mom," said Lisa. "And you? Every time we look at things regarding your past, it looks more and more like if you were 'Jane Smith'."

"You are right, it is time for me to be frank though you may not like what I'm about to say… Your comparison is… correct, Elizabeth. You are right in that I have been trained to kill people and I effectively lived that kind of life until 1995, after what I retired, crafted for myself a nice cover and met Hank. Lisa, you used to joke about my parenting methods. Why I am… or was as there is going to be some changes given the present circumstances, a rather relaxed parent is because of my own childhood. To be frank… it was hell."

"Were you… abused?" asked Dawn.

"Not in the way you think. It was hell as in 'training from hell'. The method has been used by several organizations in the world. You take young children and you raise them to be obedient killing machines, destroying systematically any trace of conscience they may develop through punishment, drugs, etc. I still had some luck as our father took the 'family tradition' approach. I was encouraged to stay loyal to my sisters and I therefore still had a little personality when I fulfilled my first contract. I was ten."

The twins looked at their mother. They knew she wouldn't joke, not now. They still had difficulties to believe that.

"Mom… Did Xiang-Ying…" said Elizabeth, remembering her conversation with Kokoa the night before.

"Yes, she went through a similar thing, but worse than me. In her case, the children were orphans and stripped of everything, including their name. She only had a number then a codename until Ryo adopted her."

"How did you… get out of it?" asked Dawn.

"When I was sixteen, my father was killed. My sisters and I were suddenly all what was left of our family and the organization it belonged to was happy to forget us. So we went freelance. We constructed a network of friends and… as the discipline relaxed, we started to live, little by little. It took me five years only to be able to somewhat function in society. I got a liking for art following a mission in Japan where I took an interest in the famous Cat's eye burglars… I even helped them involuntarily for one of their heists… my target and theirs were in the same house and each of us ended as the other's diversion. It was finally you two who really helped me become… let's say better suited to civilian life."

"Mom, do you… regret anything?" asked Elizabeth.

"No, Lisa. I know that, compared to… normal people, I'm missing something. As one of my acquaintances likes to say: I lack that little voice in the head that tells someone it's bad to kill people. Any chance for that voice to exist in me has been crushed. I still have empathy, but it's reserved for the people of my inner circle. I won't kill without necessity, but I will do it without regret."

"Should we start reading the obituaries to look if Hank had an accident?" asked Dawn.

"No… as Terry Pratchett said, it's not because you don't have morals that you don't have standards. As long as Hank stays out of our lives, he is not worth the hassle. I would… understand if you decided both to hate me, to consider me a monster."

Dawn looked at her mother. These explanations put in perspective the things she had felt while holding the cross.

"Lisa?" she asked, seeing her sister's trouble.

"I… just trying to get used to the fact my life suddenly decided to become… a shonen manga, the kind full of secret societies and hidden demons. Probably still a little numb from my last fainting when I discovered Artemis can talk, so I'm not freaking out too much… I know Mom loves us. D… Hank is the one society would consider normal but he didn't hesitate to discard us. My so-called friends at school, considered by most to be normal too, did the same when I decided to stand by my 'mutant' sister. So, I say screw normality. I prefer to be an Addams in a family that cares."

"I concur," said Dawn in her best Wednesday Addams imitation.

Joyce wiped a tear and motioned for her girls to come hug her.

_- Glendale, California, 10 September 2012, 3:43 PM -_

"You're sure it's the right address?" asked Elizabeth while Dawn checked the plan on her vidphone.

Dawn nodded and pushed the small door of the warehouse. It wasn't as empty as she would have thought. Actually, Saint-Bernard sized robotic scarabs were busy cleaning up the place and making repairs.

"Do you see how the bots are working?" said Dawn, pointing the place where the scarabs were installing a bathroom.

"Looks like they're transforming this into a house, with plenty of training space."

"Mom!"

"I'm here, Dawn!" replied Joyce waving from the top of a mezzanine.

They reached the platform and saw their mother discussing over a plan of the warehouse with a middle-aged, Mediterranean-looking man.

"Dawn, Elizabeth, please meet my old friend Antoine Berreto."

"Nice to meet you," said Elizabeth. "You are in construction?"

"Among other things," replied the man. "Let's say I procure things to people. In this case, your mother needed a team of construction robots… as well as some other things."

_A fixer, _thought immediately the green-haired teenager.

"Mom… this place?"

"It already belonged to me but as I didn't check it in sixteen years, it was in need of repairs, as well as some customization… before you ask, plans to transform it have been in motion since we got back from Japan. Saturday's discussion just had me change some things about the layout. "

"Was this one of your safehouses?" asked Elizabeth.

"Rather storage space for some things I could not really take with me in Hank's house. Antoine sold it to me at the time. The good thing is that nothing links it to Joyce Summers. My solicitor is still juggling a little to give me back access to everything I stashed away when I retired… and yes, Dawn, we're rich."

"Did… your old job pay that much?" asked Lisa.

"Your mother was one of the most expensive torpedoes in the market, girls."

"Antoine…" said Joyce with a sigh. "Please excuse him. He is sometimes too fond of things about the Prohibition… Ok, you're right, I came clean with my daughters and I take some professional pride at my work," she added, seeing his gaze. "The main thing is that contrarily to some other people in my profession, I had a rather low-key lifestyle and invested everything I spared. In sixteen years of retirement without touching it because Hank was paying most of the bills… it grew."

"Won't the divorce lawyers…"

"No. The prenuptial agreement Hank and I signed is very clear on this. Antoine, for the rest…"

"It will be delivered at the end of next week. I'll probably send Charlie."

"Is he good?"

"He started to work for me in exchange of my help to get rid of… sun-challenged vermin. After we wiped out a nest with incendiaries, he continued and uses the money to send his sister to college. He got the honor part right and…I must say that it's nice to see that the mold to create old-school mobsters like you and me is not broken."

_To think that one week ago, I would have found this conversation very strange, _thought Elizabeth.

Joyce accompanied Antoine back to the door while the girls observed the robots at work. They remembered seeing news about those when they were introduced four years ago, mainly concerns about machines taking once again people's work. In the end it had been for naught. The sad truth was that there were humans ready to work for a lot less than the purchase and maintenance cost of a construction robot. In other places, small companies actually made the 'human-made' a selling argument for those looking for authenticity. Both guessed however why their mother had decided to use robots. Robots didn't talk and their memories could be erased.

"So… did you take your gym clothes?" asked Joyce as she came back.

Both girls nodded.

"Good, let us all change, then Artemis and I can start teaching you."

Hearing his name, the cat yawned ostensibly on the armchair he had curled upon.

_- Inside Elizabeth's head, one hour later -_

The Slayer Essence was feeling all giddy. Usually, she had to augment her host slowly, so that she didn't push the body too far and exhausted her host's life energy. Usually too, her host died before she had the time to do any real job.

"Bad Watchers… always killing my hosts when eighteen… no, not always. Nikki was older."

It was different this time, at several levels. Not only did the star crystal possess so much energy it seemed unlimited to her, but it was pushing for its own modifications. It was different from what the Slayer did. She kept her host mostly human and when she died, the autopsy could not tell the difference unless they searched very well. The crystal didn't have such scruples. Elizabeth's biology was rewritten, everything made stronger and faster.

"Will host look like shiny woman in crystal when all said and done?"

The Slayer felt a stir. Her host was sparring with her mother. The Essence could feel her usual talent to help her host master any weapon kick in but… there were also bits of knowledge trickling from the crystal. Feeling curious, she observed them and… it felt somehow familiar. It was something she had known at a point but she couldn't say when.

Quitting her usual feral pose, the Slayer Essence started to go through the moves of the kata.

_- The warehouse, Glendale, 21 September 2012, 8:12 PM -_

Charles Gunn rang the bell of the door of the warehouse where Antoine had told him to deliver a shipment. Soon, a green-haired girl in exercise clothes came to open.

"You're Charlie?" she asked.

"Yes… sorry but…"

"You were expecting someone older. Mom is busy. I will open the loading dock… and with the current sundown, see if you can come in."

"Smart," said Charles, smiling.

She closed the door and he soon saw the steel door of the loading dock rise. He motioned to his driver to get the small truck in the warehouse. Once they were both in, the green-haired girl closed the door and took out a computer tablet and a style. Scarab-like robots arrived and entered the rear of the truck, unloading, and then unpacking the crates while she checked the inventory.

_Young but dead serious… who is she working for? The Yakuza? Antoine said something about this client being special. Pretty nifty software she has… her robots are testing every piece and comparing it to the inventory… _

"Looks like everything's all right. The money has been transferred to the agreed account," she added.

He took out his vidphone and quickly checked the transaction. The money had come from a Taiwanese bank, which probably meant the Triads.

_Definitely big game here… I don't even want to know what they will do with these weapons… or why they paid so much for a movie prop. _

Dawn watched him leave and lowered the steel curtain behind them. Abandoning what she called her 'Nabiki Tendo' mask, she took a box and smiled, letting the robots put away her Mom's weapons. Inside was a Chinese sword with a broken blade. She took it in her hands, letting her power work. Just as she thought, she soon saw scenes of a movie being filmed.

She arrived in the training area where Elizabeth was busy sparring with her Mom under Artemis' critic gaze. She kneeled, watching them while she still held the broken sword and pushed her power through it. What she wanted to do was subtle but if her theories were correct, there should be a timeline where…

_Contact… Hello, Master Broken Sword. Please… teach me._

Her breath became more rapid as the sigil of infinity flared on her brow. What she was doing was pretty exhausting and she doubted to be able to do it more than once, at least with that focus. She could already feel the sword disintegrate in her hands, as it was torn between two worlds. Finally, she fell on her back, all her muscles aching.

"Did it work?" asked Elizabeth as she helped her to stand up.

"I… maybe. I'm far from being as good as him, but…"

"Then let's check," said Joyce, handing a wooden sword to each of her daughters. "Better to imprint these memories in your body once and for all."

Joyce smiled as she watched the twins salute. Dawn was doing it in the Chinese way, while Elizabeth favored European fencing. As they started to move, she saw that the blonde still had the advantage thanks to the boost of the dark presence but the gap was already smaller.

_Each of them managed to use her particular talent to get the effect of years of training in barely two weeks. I… I know it's the darkness in me speaking, but I'm so proud to see them become such fine warriors. _

She and Artemis stopped them once in a while to correct a stance or a move. They still had a lot to learn, but Joyce had no doubt that they would surpass her.

"I'm so proud of you two," she said as she hugged them.

_- Near the Hemery High School, Los Angeles, 24 September 2012, 3 PM -_

"Why, Buffy?" asked the brunette girl.

"Kimberly," said Elizabeth. "I already told you. I'm not Buffy anymore."

"We were friends almost since elementary school…"

Kimberly looked at her friend. Before summer break, before she went to visit her aunt and cousin in Tokyo, she had been one of the coolest girls in school. As their second year of high school started, she had even hoped for her to become the captain of the cheerleading squad and probably the school queen.

But, when the year had started, she had announced she was quitting the squad and to never call her Buffy anymore. There were also the clothes. Buffy had often been flirting with the limits of the school's dress code. Elizabeth was just one tie short of a catholic schoolgirl uniform. True, she doubted that catholic schoolgirls would have white and scarlet uniforms but… The worse was that with the red bow in the blonde's hair, there was something in that look. Something that made her look like some kind of European aristocrat. She had even shifted from a backpack to a classical leather satchel.

"But the nice girl I knew in elementary… Kimberly, last summer, I realized I was becoming a bitch ready to discard her family to stay popular. Last summer, I met someone who made me reconsider my priorities. Do the same… before you end up alone."

"You… do you listen to yourself? Did they brainwash you in Tokyo? Did you have an accident and got you brain swapped with some Brit lady? You almost have the accent and…"

Elizabeth frowned. She was pretty sure to know why she was catching a British accent. Her brain was just too busy sorting the information that trickled from her past lives and Minako Aino had learnt English when living in the land of tweed. There was also the fact Kokoa found Californian slang… unbecoming of a self-respecting lady, so Elizabeth had decided to stick it into the 'Buffy' box along with cheerleading.

"No, Kimberly… just what you already know: I was in Tokyo when I learnt that my parents were divorcing," she lied, she hoped convincingly enough.

"So… you don't care anymore?"

"No, I don't care about being one of the popular girls anymore. The others in the cheerleading squad forced me to choose between my family and that. I chose. Jennifer and the others can say what they want. Like my Mom is fond to say: 'le chien aboie, la caravane passe'. If you change your mind, I will be here… otherwise, it was nice knowing you, but I won't go where you're heading to."

Lisa left, trying to put as much ice as she could in her heart.

_I'm not sorry, I'm not sorry… I'm a goddamned goddess and I won't cry over a choice I know to be right… even if it cost me a lot. _

It had now been almost three weeks since the big reveal. That had given her some time to… get used to things. She wondered if, in one of those alternate universes science fiction was so fond of, she would have tried to deny everything, to cling as much as she could to normalcy.

_Instead of training every night with Mom, Dawn and a magical cat… speaking of it, Mom is still trying to discover what the dark dreams mean. _

While Artemis had expected her and Dawn to learn fast because of memories of their past lives resurfacing little by little now that they knew, things related to combat were coming abnormally quickly to Elizabeth. Artemis thought it was linked to that dark presence acting as a symbiont.

Lost in her thoughts, she jumped without really paying attention, her feet stepping lightly on a nearby fence as she progressed just as naturally as she would have on the walkway.

"This is impressive," said a rotund man with a moustache in rather old grey suit.

"Hmm?"

Lisa looked around and suddenly realized where she was standing. Of course, just as she started to think about her balance, things went wobbly. Muttering curses, she gave a light tap and somersaulted, receiving herself perfectly on the ground.

"I'm sorry for breaking your concentration," said the man.

"That's nothing… guess I was channeling Ranma... Joke apart, I used to do gymnastics. Are you looking for someone?"

"I'm looking for you actually. My name is Merrick. I was sent to find you some time ago. I should have found you much sooner but there were… complications. You should have been taught, prepared."

Elizabeth frowned as her mind raced. This sounded more and more like Senshi stuff and Artemis hadn't wanted to give her the item she needed to transform into a magical girl, telling her it would trigger too many memories.

"What are you talking about?"

"I wanted to bring you… your birthright."

_Either it's Senshi stuff or he's from Mom's past… shit. Too many open venues. There could be a dozen snipers and… _

"You must come with me," continued the man, "It's much too late already. You must come with me to the graveyard."

_Graveyard… vampires. It's about the 'dark' dreams. _

"Is that the last trick perverts use to lure innocent young girls? I may not have a hammer but I can still go 'Akane' on you."

_He probably didn't catch the quote… Control, Lisa… do not give any information, just let him talk. _

"You don't understand, you have been chosen."

"Chosen to go the graveyard? No, thanks."

Merrick ran after Elizabeth as she darted in an alley… and jumped. He blinked. Her jump had not been that unusual for a Slayer… well, a really well-trained one. It had brought her at almost three meters high. What she did afterwards on the other hand was… without precedent.

Lisa's feet had touched one of the alley's walls at the top of her jump and propelled herself three meters higher on the opposite wall. Four jumps and six seconds later, she was disappearing on a rooftop.

"Really impressive… I wonder who is this Ranma? There is no one with that name in her file but… what we got from Japan is sketchy at best. Could he be her trainer?"

_- One hour later, somewhere in Los Angeles -_

Kimberly knew she shouldn't have taken that shortcut between the two buildings. She wouldn't have if her conversation with Bu… Elizabeth hadn't been so unsettling. The shadows were too heavy here. He had just gazed in her eyes and she had followed him into that building, walking in a dream-like trance. Now, she was sitting on his knees while his teeth sank in her throat.

She doubted she would survive the night. While a part of hear screamed silently, the other thanked a god she didn't believe in that the monster's thrall kept her comfortably numb.

"Now, my little lamb… Tell me about your friend, the one with the golden hair."

"Elizabeth? She's strange…"

"Tell me where she lives. If you are a good girl, I will make you immortal."

"Yes, Master Lothos."

_- The Warehouse, Glendale, 29 September 2012, 5 PM -_

"Mom… I think we have a problem," said Lisa as she entered her mother's office.

"What did happen?"

"I met a guy with a British accent on the way home. He rambled about my destiny. At first I was afraid he knew something about the Senshi, but he started to talk about cemeteries and me being chosen. I think it has to do with the dark dreams."

"Probably to observe something about vampires. What did you do?"

"I went for the 'that's how perverts lure young girls now?' line. I didn't want to deal more with him before telling you or Artemis."

"Good. While checking my contacts, I realized another of my old friends is in this town. He will probably know something about those dreams. Lisa… he is not human."

"Can we come with you?" she said, nodding.

Joyce quickly weighed the risks. On one hand, the place would be… rather unsettling and she didn't know their policy about underage customers. On the other hand, this Merrick had found Elizabeth at her school. He probably knew where they lived.

"Did he follow you?"

"No. Thanks to the Saotome-Ryu training with Dawn, I roof-hopped here and he's a middle-aged librarian."

"Good, then here should still be safe, but the flat is burned… You can come but I want a promise: whatever happens, don't freak."

"Promised. Where are we going?"

"In a club. It's called Caritas."

_Disclaimer Addendum: while not a direct crossover, the character of Broken Sword belongs to the movie Hero. I own nothing regarding him. Ranma and Nabiki Tendo are likewise part of the manga Ranma 1/2_


	7. The Calling (Part II)

_Author notes: I hope you will enjoy this chapter._

_- The Warehouse, Glendale, 29 September 2012, 5:17 PM -_

Elizabeth entered the former offices that had been transformed in two rooms, a bathroom and a living room. While most of it was ready and they were already living here for the most part, her Mom was conserving the flat as an official address for the time being. This was good, because it meant that most of her clothes were already here, even if both of them had left at the flat enough to make it pretend that it was used.

She found her sister in their common living room, busy watching anime. A man in a red coat, an insane and very toothy grin on his face, was fighting an equally crazy priest armed with bayonets.

"Hellsing?" she asked.

"Just something that crossed my mind when you spoke about two kinds of vampires."

"Ghouls and trash… true. You think the 'redeyes' are true Nosferatu like Alucard and Seras while the 'yellow eyes' are more like the artificial vampires in the show."

"Seems like it. From what Artemis told us, I even think the comparison goes further, that the real world ghouls are either bad copies or a degenerate mutant variation of the original Raksha. I also think both species have wholly different limitations."

"From what Mom told us, the ghouls have a lot of the classical limitations: sunlight, crosses, no reflection, cannot enter uninvited… They're faster, stronger and not easily wounded, but they have no funky powers like transforming in bats. Artemis wasn't able to tell us anything about the capacities of Rakshas other than they were powerful warriors. What if they were like Stoker's Dracula?"

"Able to move by day, with more magical powers but also limitations ghouls don't have like crossing water… that's a possibility but unless we remember more or meet one…"

Elizabeth crashed on the couch.

"Yeah… that's just speculation. There is another point Mom may know something about: are blessed silver bullets, or any other kind of special bullets, useful against vampires?"

"All bullets are useful, if you use them right," said Joyce, standing on the entrance of the living room.

"Heart or head?" asked Dawn.

"Knees, ankles and other articulations. Vampires, or rather ghouls to use your name for them… even with their healing abilities, their bones break and they cannot move, at least not well, without them. But for a bullet to dust a ghoul in one shot… nothing with a good size/reliability ratio existed when I retired. I tended to use a grenade launcher with incendiaries."

"And magic bullets?" asked Dawn.

"I only heard rumors about those. From what little I know, crafting such things is difficult and the methods well-guarded secrets. As you can guess, the organizations supposed to know how are usually… nasty people. Dawn, did Lisa already tell you about tonight?"

"Sorry Mom, we got sidetracked," said Elizabeth.

"It's alright, we still have time. Dawn, tonight we are going to see a contact of mine in a karaoke bar. He is not human and may know something about the dark presence. I would advise to dress semi-formally. Lisa, I let you inform her about the man you met. Just be ready at eighteen hundreds, we'll dine somewhere on the way."

Elizabeth gave her mother a mock military salute, a playful smile on her lips. Joyce smirked back and left.

"I'll tell you while I shower," said the blonde to her sister.

"No problem, sis. I was wondering why you smelled like if you were right out of training."

"I had to roof-hop here following a meeting with a creepy man," said Lisa while she entered the bathroom and started to undress.

"Can you describe him?"

"I can do better... I took a picture of him from the rooftop. Just look in my vidphone…"

Elizabeth started to detail her encounter with Merrick while she showered, answering her sister's questions for more details on a point or another. During that time, Dawn transferred Merrick's picture on her computer.

"So… if I make some deductions from the little Merrick said," said Dawn as Lisa got out of the bathroom, drying her hair. "The dark presence seems to act as a kind of holy warrior handled by him… or more probably a secret society he represents. They usually find the girls earlier… we can suppose without too much risk that the magic masking your Senshi-ness interfered. Which I would say is a good thing."

"You think that… they do to those girls the same kind of thing Mom went through as a child?"

"Wouldn't be too surprised if they did. I'm all the more curious to hear what Mom contact's has to say, because I certainly won't trust this Merrick at face value."

"Do you think we could find where he lives?"

"We don't know much… maybe she could."

"Who could?"

"An online friend. I'll go see her when we come back tonight."

"See? Ah, you mean in one of those virtual chat rooms?" said Lisa, pointing a kind of light helmet resting near her sister's computer.

"Yeah, though I would rather call it a club. It's called the 'End of Line' – a reference to the old Tron movie."

Elizabeth nodded. She remembered reading an article in a movie magazine about why a sequel to that movie was something that had been envisaged, then scrapped. The problem was that the new technologies had changed the public expectations. People now lived in a world where AIs, cyborgs, androids and space colonization were a reality. That changed a lot of things about what the public found believable.

While it meant that movies set in the real world included the most recent technologies… and would have looked like cyberpunk science fiction to the viewer of the eighties, it had also made things more difficult for science fiction writers. People heard about things happening in space every day and more people actually went up there every year. The public knew at least a little about how things really moved up there. The idea of dogfight in space now seemed just as 'vintage' as the Flash Gordon comics. It was acceptable in old movies, but any recent show or movie had better be realistic enough about things like acceleration and the lack of sound. According to the article, it was one of the reasons why the Star Wars prequels planned at some point were finally never filmed.

It had been similar for things related to AIs and virtual worlds. It was difficult for a movie to paint AIs as evil when you had real ones being saddened by that vision and giving interviews about it… while continuing the fight to obtain civil rights. Also… the idea of people viewing what happened between computers as a virtual environment, the whole idea called by names such as Grid or Matrix… it was a reality since that mysterious event called Child's Rhyme nine years ago.

_Which brings us to hackers… or rather netrunners to use the 'cool' term setting up their own private meeting spaces in the Net. I knew that Dawn dabbled but… we'll see. _

The twins went to their respective rooms to dress. A while later, they both came out and checked their respective outfits, Lisa's sky blue dress against Dawn's dark red one.

"Blue Oni, Red Oni?" asked the green-haired twin.

"Inverted then. You're the patient one."

"Are you ready girls?" asked Joyce, standing at the entrance of their living room.

Both girls nodded and followed their mother.

_- Caritas, Los Angeles, 29 September 2012, 8:30 PM -_

_Okay… _

The room Dawn was looking at was pretty standard for a jazz club. It had a scene, a bar and round tables on the floor. The problem was the people in that room. Had the décor been a little more… alien, she could have thought about being in a bar in some distant star system like the one in the last Babylon 5 movie.

She stayed close to her mother as they walked towards the bar. She didn't like how some of the patrons looked at her, as if she was some kind of tasty morsel. She suddenly felt Lisa's presence and some of the non-humans started to look curiously at her sister, with a mix of fear and hate.

_Probably because of the dark presence… I hope we'll have answers tonight._

She saw her mother waving to the barman, a humanoid with a blue-green spiked head.

"Hello, Jeff," she said while she sat on a stool.

"Oh my… Kyrie, it's been ages!" replied the Brachen barman.

"Dawn, Lisa, this is my old friend Jeff. When I knew him he was whipping the meanest cocktails in Acapulco. Jeff, these are my daughters Dawn and Elizabeth."

"Nice to meet you, young ladies. So, how can I serve you tonight?"

"Let's start with a Chupacabra for me. And for you girls?"

"Iced tea, please," said Elizabeth.

"A Red Bull," said Dawn.

Joyce smiled to her daughters, though she mentally noted she would probably have to check Dawn's caffeine intake. She had expected them to freak out more but the weeks spent with a talking cat had probably helped to prepare them for their first contact with the supernatural community. There was still a little fear, mostly because they knew that some of the patrons were not just funny-looking people, but monsters temporarily behaving as they were in neutral ground.

_And that's good… a little fear will keep them cautious. _

Having served the twins, the barman started to mix, among other things, tequila, lime juice and jalapeno slices.

"So… as I suppose this is not a simple family outing…" said Jeff.

"Unfortunately… no. Have you noticed how some of the patrons are looking at Elizabeth?"

"Yes, they feel a predator on the prowl… I can feel it myself. There is something in… Holy… it's recent, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Elizabeth, after taking in her mother's slight nod. "I have dreams. I see girls my age fight and being killed by monsters with yellow eyes and funny brows. Today… I met someone who looked like a British librarian. He wanted me to go with him, but I refused."

Joyce could almost see the thoughts racing in her old friend's spiked head.

"That serious?" asked Elizabeth.

"Yes, Miss, that serious."

"Oh my, such somber faces," said a green-skinned, horned demon in a purple suit that was standing near them.

"Ladies, please meet Caritas' owner: the Host," said Jeff. "Boss, Miss Elizabeth here is the Slayer, a Slayer who never met a Watcher."

"What's a Slayer?" asked Elizabeth.

"Now that's a long story, pumpkin" said the Host. "I don't know all of it as I have only been in here for a little more than a decade. I think I can help you but I must first verify some things. Elizabeth, would you like to sing?"

The blonde frowned, trying to make sense of the statement.

_Got it… he's like Dawn with her psychometry, but he needs to hear people sing. _

"You are a Seer, right? You read omens in the songs of people?"

"That's one… cute way to say it, sugar."

"Should I go on the scene?"

"Yes. You don't have to be afraid…"

"I'm not."

Elizabeth got on the scene and took the microphone, wondering what she would… She suddenly felt one of those random memories trickle, probably something that came from Minako's time in England. She selected the music on the computer's tactile screen. She started to sing.

"I'd sit alone and watch your light. My only friend through teenage nights. And everything I had to know, I heard it on my radio…"

The Host, also known as Lorne, looked at the teen on the scene. She was singing well and… she started to move in a way that reminded him of one of his favorite Britons. He smiled. He remembered when Freddie had come to Caritas four months ago to hold one of his yearly 'I survived' parties. Apex Pharmaceuticals had gotten this cure out just in time for him.

_Freddie and the others… introduced rather brutally to the supernatural when that group affiliated with Wolfram and Hart called the Dark Agency tried to 'acquire' them… until they were saved by a teenage witch who liked to dress up as a superhero. Freddie told me they had a 'thank you' party with this Sailor V… _

He started to see her aura, the multiple depths in it as the song continued. The Slayer was here, old and angry, itching for a fight. Suddenly, he saw the Slayer being sucked inside of her, its aura completely vanishing, replaced by something else, something warm that was expanding in the whole club.

"All we hear is radio ka ka…"

Some people, among which a hardened demon who had so far wanted to rip her a new one, clapped in their hands at the same time as she did.

"Radio goo goo…"

More joined her. Now he was pretty sure where he had already felt such a thing. Her aura just screamed 'Love me!' in a way…

_That's not something 'alien' to her like the Slayer. That's her true aura. She has succubus blood… and the Slayer awakened it? It's supposed to augment all the capacities of the host. No, it's… _

The pressure continued to rise as she sung. People were smiling. It wasn't the cruel smirk he was used to see on some of those faces but a genuine warm smile.

"Radio what's new? Radio, someone still loves you!"

_- Inside Elizabeth's head, just as she climbed on the scene -_

"Demons… need to fight," said the Slayer as she started to pour aggression in her host's aura.

"Listen young lady… no, lady does not cut it. Currently you're just an honorless brat who wants to fight for the sake of it," said the shining woman, jumping out of the crystal. "El's breath! Thankfully your mother can't hear you now! Now go to your room!" she added, pointing the large room near the fountain's plaza.

The Slayer thought for half a second about fighting the woman but the idea was washed away by something she had not felt for ages: shame. Shaken, she moved slowly, not really understanding what was happening to her.

On the plaza, Ishtar sighed, thinking she would probably have to re-educate her niece from scratch.

"What am I singing?"

She smiled. She recognized one of her favorites when she was Minako. She could also feel the talent of the Pylean seer brushing her aura. She sent her own probes and smiled. This Lorne was a man after her own heart.

"Time to pour out the old charm!"

The crystal flared. Ishtar knew that her current body was still far from optimal specs, but it had already drifted enough towards what it should be to allow for that. She started to sing, accompanying her host.

"All we hear is Radio ga ga… Radio blah blah… Radio, what's new? Radio, someone still loves you!"

_- Caritas, a second later -_

Lorne felt her aura flare even more. The Slayer was now completely undetectable. All that remained was the other one. His talent reached the next stage as he started to see glimpses of her future.

He saw her adult, in a regal sky blue dress, shaking hands with a big man in a black suit. While the act in itself was common, the scenery and the identity of the man made it extraordinary. She was standing on the steps of the White House's entrance and a lot of members of the press were busy filming and taking photos. There was also another fact. She was quite openly showing her tail and her four delicately curved horns. Even more, the naturalized Austrian who was the Republican candidate to this year presidential elections thanks to a recent Constitutional Amendment was asking her how it was to be a superhero.

The image shifted. He saw a battle. She was clad in a golden thing that he immediately nicknamed battle lingerie and was probably the succubus idea of an armor. She was leading a 'spandex squad' against an invasion of demons while Los Angeles laid in flaming ruins. Some were humans or androids, he couldn't tell given their complete, metallic armor. But others were demons. He was sure about a Yuki Onna and at least another succubus. There was even an oriental dragon with an aquamarine mane. Race didn't seem to matter as they all fought the invasion back.

The image shifted again and he saw a little girl praying. The funny, or scary, thing was that she was praying to a statuette of Elizabeth clad in her battle lingerie. A name muttered by the girl sent shivers down Lorne's spine: Lady Ishtar.

"You had your time, you had the power. You've yet to have your finest hour."

Lorne looked at the blonde girl on the scene as she ended the song. He was feeling the mother of all headaches coming as the girl's aura went back to more normal levels. His patrons had cheered her. All of them.

_What else to expect when the Goddess of Love herself graces us… They will probably be back to normal in a few days but tonight… _

The evening had resumed and it seemed that the club's atmosphere was lighter, the patrons mingling more freely, the laughs more frequent and sincere. Even people who had just come here to drink alone had ceased to be their usual grumpy selves. It wasn't blunt mind control robbing people of their will, or even like some cheering spells he had seen. It was a lot subtler, just dulling a preconception here, enhancing a little courage there. People could continue to act freely if they wished… but the alternative was so much more enjoyable.

_Temptation mastered to its fullest…_

"Should I sing too, Mister Lorne?" asked Dawn. "I'm not as good as my sister..."

He started to panic. From the vision he had, he was pretty sure the girl on the scene was the reincarnation of Ishtar. If Dawn was her sister in both lives, that meant she was Ereshkigal. He had absolutely no wish to take a peek in the mind of the Queen of the Underworld.

"No… that won't be necessary," he said, restoring his calm. "Let's go to my office, what I have to say is private."

_- Lorne's office, a few minutes later -_

"Normally, I would tell you to prepare to have a short an eventful life, pumpkin," said Lorne. "As far as I know, Slayers tend to die one year after they are called in average. It's not something… built in, but Slayers attract trouble. Demons can feel what they are and a lot know what that feeling means. Fights tend to ensue. The Slayer is certainly faster and stronger than most, but she's only a young girl. When she dies, the next one is called and the cycle continues…"

He could see the tears in the blonde's eyes. He hated breaking such bad news but…

"Does that have to do with the… Librarian?"

"In part. They call themselves the Watchers. They are a secret society based in England who fights against demons. Mostly, they train and assist the Slayer."

"How young do they start to train them?" asked Joyce.

"From infancy if they can. It is really rare for them to miss someone like they did with Lisa."

"And if possible without any other 'family' than Watchers… I know all too well how that works," she said with a bitter tone. "Lorne, how long until they send a black ops team to kill my daughter?"

Lorne blinked and wondered what kind of horrors he would see if Joyce were to sing for him. He had more or less guessed that she wasn't the typical working Mom but that… the worse was that she had not asked if, but when. She had absolutely no illusions on the Watchers' morals and he could already guess that if they came, she would kill them with the same icy, business-like expression.

"If she turns against them… it will be short. The problem is that the same aura that makes the Slayer feel the demons allows the magic-users working for the Watchers to localize her… but I said that it was what I would normally say… There is something else in you, pumpkin. Compared to it, the Slayer is small fry."

"What did you see?" asked Dawn.

"Change… of such an order I shiver to think about it. Mythology is one thing but that… the demons have their legends about the gods and how they relate to the different demon races. The one you… were or are… Ishtar is the Succubus Queen."

"Not Lilith?" asked Dawn.

"Lilith was her daughter, the one that led the succubae survivors on this world after an event they call Skyfall."

Elizabeth raised her head. Skyfall… Artemis had used that word too.

"So Elizabeth is changing into a succubus?" asked Joyce.

"Yes. You felt her aura during her song? It was still rather… innocent, a 'friendship is magic' kind of thing rather than a 'love me and despair' one, but that was definitely succubus charm."

"Am I… I mean…"

"Ifs your question is was Ishtar a good girl… there is no simple answer. Compared to the Old Ones, the creatures some of the most whacked-out demons still worship…"

"Old Ones… any relation to Lovecraft?" asked Dawn.

"That's a good approximation actually. If demon legends are reliable, the gods can be just as bad as in mythology, but at least they somewhat care for us mortals and our free will. As for Ishtar… succubae consider her a kind goddess, but also a fierce one once she decides to go to war."

"On a more practical point… can you give us the lay of the land about this city's supernatural community?" asked Joyce.

"Yes… I can do that."

_- The Warehouse, Glendale, 30 September 2012, 1 AM -_

Dawn took her virtual helmet and put it on her head. She felt the item deploy, attaching itself and the electrodes putting themselves in place to read and influence her brainwaves. The visor descended before her face and her vision filled with virtual objects she started to manipulate.

She envied cyborgs. Cyborgs could disconnect their flesh body's motor controls to control fully the virtual one. Some people with a full cyber-brain could even do both at once. True, they also took risks she didn't with a simple virtual helmet. Their mind became a system connected to the Net. She had heard stories about black software capable of erasing or even rewriting a cyborg's memories. All the people with neuroware she knew nevertheless said it was totally worth it.

With that helmet, she could feel what her virtual body felt and control it up to a point by doing things such as thinking about walking rather than doing it. It was far from perfect as she needed a lot more concentration than normal, but it worked. She remembered a recent interview of Ralph Fiennes where the journalist had asked him what he thought now that the technology imagined in the _Strange Days _movie was a reality.

_A pity. Mom would probably agree now but with my biology evolving… _

"Mind if I piggyback?" said Lisa as she took her own virtual helmet and connected it.

"Be my guest."

Lisa's vision warped, soon replaced by a kind of amphitheater all in dark, red-lined glass surfaces. She was now seeing through the eyes of her sister's avatar. She saw the icon to generate her own blinking.

_Better to stay like this… I would use a default avatar and I bet that would be like a major fashion failure in this place. _

She saw the reflection of her sister's avatar on a wall. In this world, Dawn was an obsidian statue of her physical self, wrapped in neon green inscriptions – most of them in dead languages – that slithered like snakes over her body. Dawn inserted a neon key in a door and reality shifted again, revealing a room that looked like an English pub with booths… but all designed in neon-tinged black surfaces, a lot like in the Tron movie.

The tables were occupied by fantastic creatures talking together, sometimes exchanging virtual objects that represented files. In a way, the creatures here were even more fantastic than the ones in Caritas. Yet, in another, they did not force one to reevaluate his worldview. Everything here was, after all, just an elaborate illusion inside a computer.

Dawn walked to a table where a Japanese princess in an elaborate ice blue kimono adorned with swans, a black snake coiled around her neck like a scarf, was chatting with a human-faced spider.

"Solitaire!" said the princess. "Nice to see you here but… you have a rider," she finished, frowning.

"My sister, Kushinada. I vouch for her."

"Well it won't do, don't you think, Anansi?" asked the princess to the spider.

"Assuredly," replied the spider, his accent reminding Lisa of the Caribbeans. "She needs her own body so that she can be properly introduced… and a name of course."

_A name… right, netrunners think like superheroes. They use fancy codenames and their avatars are their costumes,_ thought Lisa. _Something linked to who I really am but not too blatant… I know._

She clicked the item to project her own avatar.

"Sorry for the default icon… please call me Morningstar."

The spider had a little laugh and waved his legs, spinning neon blue virtual silk around her. Lisa saw the alert icons from her helmet telling her that her settings were modified and files installed.

_Stay calm… Dawn would have cut the connection if there was a problem. _

"Please consider this as a welcome gift," said Anansi.

Her default avatar shifted, becoming a she-devil with an aura of dark flames as the silk disappeared.

"Why… got it Morningstar equals Lucifer," she said with a frown. "Thank you Anansi."

"You're welcome."

"So, now that your sister's… wardrobe malfunction is corrected. What brings you here tonight?" asked Kushinada.

"I need a favor," said Dawn, handing a floating white disk with moving bar codes to the princess.

"I'll let you do your business," said Anansi. "Say hello to Yamata for me, Kushinada."

"I will," replied the princess as the spider disappeared from the room, leaving a blinking 'END OF TRANSMISSION' icon that soon vanished.

Kushinada looked at the file while fanning herself.

"That's not much," she said. "What do you need to know?"

"His current physical address in Los Angeles."

"Doable… I sense that you have a question, Morningstar."

"Yes… how did the two of you meet if that's not private?"

"Oh… we met on a forum on urban legends. We were looking for information on the same subject," she said with a mysterious smile. "A little later, your sister helped me make sense of something I… acquired. Since then, we have been exchanging favors. Solitaire has a real knack at organizing information. Solitaire, I'll have that information Monday morning. Is that all right?"

"Yes, thank you Kushinada."

They chatted for a while about various news subjects. Elizabeth noted that neither Kushinada nor her sister mentioned anything regarding their 'offline' live. Once they had disconnected, she turned to face her sister.

"So, not too bad?" asked the blonde

"Not too bad. For what was left out of your question: she was looking for information on the Senshi and I didn't tell her about Sailor Pluto."

"You noticed the swans on her kimono?"

"Yes I did. The snake around her neck is normal considering her nickname. The swans now…"

"From what Artemis told us, Sailor Mercury's old name is Sarasvati… and the swan is that goddess' sacred animal."

"I came to the same conclusion but we have to be prudent."

"I see what you mean. She might be like us, trying to see clear about the dreams and bits of memories she's seeing. But she might also be an enemy knowing just enough to lure us."

"To quote one of my favorite movies: 'the issue is not whether you're paranoid. The issue is whether you're paranoid enough.'"

_- Hemery High School, 1 October 2012, 12:23 AM -_

Elizabeth and Dawn sat at a table outside, taking out their lunches. The girls looked as they saw two adults coming towards them, a blonde woman and a black man.

"Elizabeth Summers? I'm Detective Kate Lockley," said a blonde woman showing her police badge, "and this is my partner Detective Luther Banks. We are investigating on the disappearance of Kimberly."

Lisa tilted her head. Now that she thought about it, it was true she hadn't seen her today.

"The last time I saw her it was on Friday, as we were leaving school."

"I heard so much. It seems that your discussion was rather heated."

"We argued, that's true… but we each left our own way quickly after school."

"What was the argument about?"

"The short version: I grew up and she didn't. To elaborate a little, I realized my family was more important than school popularity and she couldn't understand it."

Kate Lockley frowned. There was something strange in the tone used by the girl.

"Sorry to ask this but… did something happen to make you change?" asked Banks.

"Well I suppose you could find out rather easily as the papers are being filed with City Hall anyway," said Dawn. "Our parents are divorcing."

"I'm sorry," said Lockley.

The detective caught the shrug of the green-haired girl. Now that she saw her exotic amethyst eyes, she was pretty sure that her hair color wasn't caused by dye.

_And kids with the GES are often bullied in school or abused… they stand out too much. As my dear partner would probably say, ebony and ivory lived in perfect harmony… and ganged up happily on green. _

"No need," said Dawn. "It's better like this. As other people will probably hint about it, my 'unnatural' hair color is one of the reasons Lisa broke up with her old social circle."

"Yes," confirmed Elizabeth. "Kimberly was not the worse about it, but others tried to convince me it was normal to pick up on… those they considered freaks."

Lockley consigned some more things about the girls' statement and made them sign it on her tablet. As she left, she couldn't shake the feeling that they were hiding something.

"Did you get a reading?" asked Elizabeth in Japanese.

"Yes, when I touched the tablet," replied Dawn in the same language. "They are not from Juvenile, but from Homicide. They are after 'Dracula'."

Lisa frowned. Dracula was the nickname of a serial killer who left his victims bloodless. From what they had learnt in Caritas, it was effectively a mean for Lothos, Los Angeles' self-proclaimed vampire king, to mark his territory. Lisa sat at the table, feeling like crying.

"Dawn… do you think…"

"That she was taken because of the Slayer? That's a possibility."

"If she has been killed because of me…"

"Then it's time to press Artemis. We're Sailor Senshi. Fighting this kind of thing is what we do."

"I think I can retrace Kimberly's path last Friday… maybe you can get a good reading."

"Okay, but we break off before sunset and we connect our GPS so that Mom can trace us."

_- Somewhere in Los Angeles, 1 October 2012, 17:45 -_

"Look, here are the wonder twins," said Lockley.

"You don't like them," said his partner, raising his nose from his tablet.

"My instincts are telling me something is majorly wrong with them… and no it's not because of her hair color. They feel like… if they were used to death. What did the background check give?"

"Just as they said, the parents are divorcing and the mother obtained full guardianship."

"The father…"

"Didn't even try to fight it. Joyce… Venturi didn't ask for alimonies and the two girls sided with their mother."

"Is their mother loaded?"

"Impossible to say but she doesn't seem to have any difficulty paying her bills. She's an art broker and a lot of her work is handled overseas, via the Net. Immigration records show yearly trips to Japan – her sister lives there – usually with their daughters. The last time was in August."

"Which gives them a very good alibi for at least one of the murders, unless the cult hypothesis is verified…"

They watched the twins as they progressed through the streets, the green-haired one sometimes stopping to touch a stone or a trashcan for a little while, before shaking her head. Lockley started the hybrid car. They still had other leads to verify.

_- Not so far away, at the same time -_

"She turned here," said Dawn, removing her hand from a trashcan.

Lisa nodded and looked at her watch. They still had three quarters of an hour before complete sunset but the shadows were already lengthening. They had been stuck in school for too long because of that assignment for computer lab.

"That's a shortcut to go to her home," said Lisa, nodding towards the alley.

"Doesn't it go to that studio that closed five years ago?"

"Yes, the digital revolution hit them hard and they closed. Some students like to use the yard to make out discreetly."

They entered the alley. The shadows were heavy here and Dawn winced as she put her hand on the wall.

"Something… something old, full of hate and will to dominate. I'm sorry, Lisa-chan. Kimberly was taken."

They continued, reaching the yard. It was small, only ten meters wide, just a hole between a now unused warehouse, a studio and a small office building, with several alleys going out of it, all of them but one too small for cars. With Hollywood still recuperating from the blow dealt by photorealistic virtual realities and the public's tastes evolving, it had yet failed to be used again.

Dawn pointed another alley. They walked in it, noticing its turns and the too many blind doors.

"You're sweating, are you all right?"

"I'll make do, Lisa-chan. So much hate… He's not here but…"

"So you are a seer," said a voice from the alley they had exited.

"Merrick," said Elizabeth, moving in front of her sister.

"I am not your enemy," said the Watcher.

"That remains to be seen," said the blonde girl.

"You know that you are different. You can do things no one else can… You are the Slayer, the one girl in all the world with the strength to fight vampires."

"Faulty logic. This planet is a big place… and not the only place these days. One girl is not enough," said Dawn. "What aren't you telling us?"

Elizabeth suddenly winced. She felt something, like a buzz on her perceptions as people walked towards them. At first sight they looked like a common gang, but she didn't like how they stuck to the shadows.

"Holy… ambushed like rookies. Merrick, you take my sister out of here. I'll rejoin you later."

"You don't…" started the Watcher.

Lisa had already started to move, taking the arm of one of her attacker and striking him right on the shoulder. The articulation shattered under the impact. A vicious kick in the opposite knee had a similar effect. Taking the monster's knife, she slashed his throat, severing the neck and dusting him. She lost no time and danced towards a second ghoul, letting the Slayer's instincts and her training guide her while the faces from the ghoul became that distorted mask she had seen so many times in her dreams. From the corner of her eyes, she saw that Merrick and Dawn were retreating towards the yard.

_Good…_

She continued to advance. She had to push them away from Dawn. Her dance made her reach one of the items she had noticed: a piece of wood with a conveniently sharp end that protruded from a trashcan. Grabbing it with her free end, she drew on the Slayer to use the makeshift stake as countless other girls before her.

Suddenly her stake was cut, intercepted by an ancient-looking sword with a straight blade. She made a backflip, retreating to see her new adversary. He was wearing ancient-looking clothes with a brown cloak. He had long, braided red hair that made him look like some kind of old Scottish warrior and eyes that burnt like embers.

"Lothos, I presume," she said. "Nice sword."

"The sword of Attila, young one. Maybe the only human that had worth… Soon, I will taste your blood."

"We'll…"

She was cut. His eyes… she shouldn't have looked at them. She felt her perceptions drowning, dulling, a little like when she used her virtual helmet.

_- Inside the Slayer's head, at the same time -_

The crystal was flaring again, but this time, the Slayer could feel it was in reaction to an external threat. She could feel it too. It was dark and syrupy, trying to break her host's will while whispering of how he would defile Elizabeth once it had her.

"Thrall… old vampires sometimes have it."

Vampires… since she had seen again Xin Rong's death, the name felt wrong, usurped. She didn't have much time to ponder it though. She had to help her host resist the other's influence.

"If you think I will let you pull a Galaxia on me," said the voice of the shiny woman in the crystal. "Think again."

The crystal star was burning like a sun now, forcing the Slayer to avert her eyes.

_- A second later, in the real world -_

Elizabeth felt the fog leave her brain as, for an instant, the symbol of Venus flared on her brow. She jumped, as high as she could. The Slayer in her wanted to fight, but as she took height, it became clear that other ghouls were coming in her back. She bounced on the walls, reaching the rooftop.

_Here… it's the end of the afternoon, but there is still sunlight. I should…_

She felt his presence rising as he landed on the rooftop, haloed in unnaturally thick shadows. She tried to exchange some blows, but she soon realized that he was stronger than her as his sword cut cleanly through a steel pole.

_Must dodge. That sword's not normal. _

She continued to move, reaching another roof and he followed, a cruel smile on his lips.

"So you have some magic of your own to shake my thrall like you did… it is rare that witches are chosen. But it doesn't matter. You are too young, barely trained. I am only prolonging my pleasure."

"I am full of surprises," she said, jumping out of the roof.

She crossed a lot of mental fingers. Jumping down ten meters wasn't a problem. She had already done it while training. The problem was where she intended to land. She breathed of relief as she crouched, safely balanced, on the bus' roof.

She felt his glee as the dark shadows moved on the roofs parallel to her. As long as the bus continued, she was safe. The problem was the bus stop she was seeing further in the street. She took an item in her jacket and aimed carefully, using all of her Slayer's strength and memories of playing softball with Dawn and Celia.

She smiled as the item reached a roof exactly at the same time as the shadow and drowned the place in white fog. She lost no time and jumped again, concentrating to hold the aura trick her Mom was teaching them to erase her presence and had prevented the crowd from noticing her stunt. Hopefully, it would be enough.

_- In the empty yard, at the same time -_

Merrick held a hand on his wound as he fell. He recognized the face of the vampire that just rammed a cavalry saber through his stomach. It was Amilyn, Lothos right-hand man. The vampire searched him and took his portable vidphone, crushing it with a smile.

"Happy dying, Watcher. That will be long and very painful. I made sure to stab through your liver. My master is chasing your Slayer for his own fun… As for me…"

He nodded towards the unconscious green-haired teenager being held by another vampire. A minute earlier, she had been tasered.

"I am sure we will make good use of her talent… once she is trained to behave. Happy dying, Watcher," he said, waving to him as they piled up in a van with blackened windows.

Suddenly, he heard a muffled sound coming from the other end of the yard, like if someone exhaled rapidly. The Slayer's mother was there, holding a strange-looking pistol. She quickly put it back in the holster under her grey trench-coat.

"Bullets…"

She moved to him and showed him the screen of her vidphone, where a dot had started to move on a map of Los Angeles.

"Tracer round has a different meaning these days."

"They will…"

"No. You heard the minion. Lothos wants her for her gifts. He won't allow her to be 'damaged', at least not for the moment," she said while typing a text message on her phone.

"Here," she continued. "I texted her your position and the access code for the tracer's signal. Lisa is alive but her own fight took her in the wrong direction. Even at full speed, she will need at least ten minutes to get here. I'm letting her decide if she should kill you or not."

He looked at her eyes, trying to find some humanity in them but only saw ice. That was perhaps the worse. There was absolutely no trace of hate in her eyes. He was just a problem to be solved, an obstacle to be removed.

"Don't you…"

"Not for the likes of you, Watcher. I know what the Council will do once they realize they cannot control Lisa."

He wanted to tell her she was wrong that what they were doing was a sacred duty… but he couldn't. That was the worse situation they could ever be in. The Slayer's family knew enough about the Council to never trust them and… he saw it in the woman's stance. She was a seasoned warrior, maybe from an independent demon hunter family.

_No, that's not it… she's an assassin, maybe even a Tarakan. God preserves us if the Slayer falls in their hands… _

"How much… blood…"

"Not your business. Artemis," she said, turning to a white cat. "You wait here for Lisa and tell her to check my GPS. You also tell her that she's in for a lot of awareness training. I will not allow that kind of rookie mistake to happen again. Last thing: she is to decide how much the Watcher is a security risk."

"You expect her..." asked the cat.

"Her mess, she cleans up. And, yes, Watcher, that means she will kill you if she decides you're a risk. Artemis… I know I'm harsh, but she stepped in a dangerous world. Hesitating will only get her killed."

"Hey! I'm a cat," replied the feline with a little laugh.

Joyce smirked and exited the yard. Merrick noted that her presence was the thing that disappeared first, like if she suddenly became unworthy of interest. He had heard from one of the junior Watchers about assassins mastering specialized forms of magic he called 'ninja tricks' but he had never thought he would meet one. He looked at the cat then, wondering…

_Of course… a lot of people only see the cute companion in cats and they forget. We forget they are very efficient predators with absolutely no shame about that fact… _

_- Lothos' lair, Los Angeles, thirty minutes later -_

Kimberly watched as her master drank the blood of the nerd freak. She thought it was a pity that Lothos had been very clear: the green-haired mutie was for him alone.

_Why… why did Buffy choose her over me? She's her sister but… why was she ready to become an outcast for her?_

The master vampire raised his head, letting the chained teen fall on her knees, the manacles holding her arms high against the room's wall.

"Such fire in those purple eyes, my seer," said Lothos, holding Dawn's chin.

"I am not yours," replied the teen on a flat tone.

"And what if I turned you?"

"You know better than to try… you tasted my blood. You are too smart to forge the weapon that would slay you."

"You are truly wise beyond your years, child."

"My sister is coming. You will die," she said, an enigmatic smirk on her lips.

"We'll see… Her Watcher is dead and she is barely trained. She will soon be just another Slayer I felled. I will let you watch when I kill her. After that… I will teach you your place, my seer."

_- In the derelict yard, Los Angeles, at the same time -_

"Merrick!" yelled Elizabeth as she jumped from the warehouse's roof.

She kneeled next to the fallen Watcher, checking for life signs. Artemis strolled behind her, catching his breath.

"I'm still alive… barely," said the Watcher in a whisper.

"It…"

"I cannot feel my legs, Elizabeth… Listen, Lothos took your sister and your mother is going after them."

"I know… She texted me. I… Merrick, Lothos is insanely strong. He has a sword, something old and very magical that he said belonged to Attila."

"There is a legend… Mars is supposed to have given it to Attila but… I don't remember more. How did you survive?"

"Mom… she insists that I always have protection with me… and that sounded really wrong. Tear gas grenades. The ghouls have enhanced sense of smell, so…"

Merrick laughed then winced as the pain from his wound hit him. The Slayer's mother did obviously not have the Watcher's preconceptions about using modern weaponry in the demon hunting business.

"You call them ghouls and not vampires… why?"

"They're…"

He heard the cat say something in Japanese, cutting her sentence. She replied another thing in the same language, visibly upset.

"Sorry," she said. "My cat just reminded me that I had to decide to let you live or not… so that I should mind how much I tell you."

"Would you do it?"

Elizabeth closed her eyes, then opened them. It seemed to the Watcher that a little of her mother's ice was now in them.

"Y… yes I would. The Slayer showed me the Cruciamentum. She showed me how Bernadette Laffont's family was held hostage by your kind after she decided she wanted nothing to do with the Slayer. I have to protect my family. If that means what's left of my innocence must die, so be it," she said, wiping a tear.

Merrick nodded. This was getting worse and worse. The ability of the Slayer Essence to show what happened to the previous Chosen Ones to the current one was usually sketchy… and most Potentials were Watcher-raised anyway and would never dare to question them. They had no such luck in this case.

"If only there wasn't only one Slayer… We cannot afford one turning dark…"

"Dark is not evil," said Elizabeth, "and light is not good, Merrick. This has to stop. I will not allow any more girls to be destroyed for a war you are not interested in winning."

_Have we sunk so low? She considers us to be worse than the demons. How come that she makes me ashamed to be a Watcher? _

He looked at her. The astrological symbol of Venus was etched on her brow, shining a soft, golden light.

"Who… who are you?"

"I am…"

Her vidphone rang. She opened it and verified the message.

"Ouch… he couldn't have chosen an easier place… like the school gym? Nooo, El's breath! He had to set up his lair on Hollywood Boulevard!"

Merrick frowned. The girl had just spoken, even cursed, in Akkadian as if it was her native language. He looked at the cat that he had believed to be Dawn's familiar, when he still thought the green-haired teen to be a witch in training. Now, he realized there was something else, something bigger.

_Reincarnation: that's the only sensible explanation to this mess. The Slayer awakened something old in her. _

"Okay… I've got a target," said Elizabeth in English. "Artemis… I… Lothos is too strong. I need… the other me. Only she can do it."

_Well, that confirms it nicely, _thought the Watcher.

"Yes but…"

"He's probably doing unspeakable things to Dawn right now and if Mom is taken, she will die or worse."

The cat nodded and jumped on a barrel. The crescent on his brow flared, a soft moonlight beam aiming at the table's surface between his paws. A white, gold and pink scepter materialized.

"Just take it in your hand. You'll know."

Elizabeth extended her hand, taking the rather girly accessory. She felt a kind of warmth and she pressed it against her heart. She remembered some things, a little like the dreams the Slayer had shown her. The difference was in style. The Slayer had been all about horror movies… these memories were rather like something out of Celia's Wedding Peach mangas. But Artemis had been right, she knew what she had to do.

"VENUS CRYSTAL POWER, MAKE UP!"

_- At the same time, in Elizabeth's head -_

"Wrong! All wrong!" said the Slayer Essence as she observed the energy running from the crystal star to the stick in her host's hand.

She wasn't sure what she was doing but… she touched the star's surface. She had expected it to burn but… it was just nicely warm. She started to feel something, emotions and concepts she had almost forgotten in her dark existence.

_GOODNESS!_

She was hearing a gentle masculine voice telling her why she shouldn't do some things, why compassion was not weakness but a strength, why hate and ignorance had to be fought.

Following clues she barely remembered, she started to trace symbols on the star's crystalline surface, sending waves of purple light through its golden light

_FRIENDSHIP!_

She was feeling all fuzzy inside. She remembered girls… she remembered one time where her best friend and she were busy trying the hammer her friend had just received from her father as she became an adult. She held the memory vivid in her soul, refusing to let it fade again in the darkness.

She continued to trace the symbols. Others symbols she did not really understand appeared in response. Following her instinct, her finger drew an answer.

_HAPPINESS!_

The fuzziness reached her heart. She remembered being happy. It was not only the hollow satisfaction brought by destruction that had been a poor replacement for it as she passed from Slayer to Slayer. She remembered living instead of stealing the life of her hosts. She remembered a city in the clouds and playing with her pet tiger as she was a child. Now, the stars of her memories were shedding a light on the darkness of her ignorance, lighting again the fire in her soul.

This time she understood better the symbols. She had known how to write that language.

"Attention, this will reset the vajra to default configuration for user Ishtar… do you want to proceed?" she read aloud, marveling at how easily the words flowed from her mouth now.

_LOVE!_

She staggered and started to cry as the ice in her heart and soul shattered, washing away the darkness.

"Mother… I'm so sorry… Now, I have to help Auntie Ishtar."

She traced the last symbol, the one meaning 'yes'.

_- Half a second later, in the physical world -_

The girly accessory called a henshin stick shattered in Elizabeth's hand, replaced by a short golden rod with a lion head on each end. The style reminded Merrick of the mosaics on Babylon's walls.

The magical girl transformation sequence his Slayer was going through hiccupped. The ribbon of golden stars spiraling around her exploded in a lion's roar and the kind of leotard that had started to appear disappeared.

A second later, the stars started to agglomerate, forming metallic pieces on her naked body. Intricate, flame-like brass and orange swirls wrapped around her arms, with small chains going from the bracers to the ring on each of her now perfectly manicured fingers.

The same operation repeated on her legs, swirls forming high-heeled boots rising to her mid-thighs. A corset of flaming swirls hugged her, delicate brass chains linking it to the choker around her neck. An orange, pleated silk skirt appeared, barely descending below her waist on the right, then angling to reach her left knee.

A girdle made of a chain of interlocked hearts materialized around her waist and, finally a tiara held hair that now reached her waist, three golden spikes forming a W on the front while a star-shaped, eight-pointed emerald adorned her brow.

Merrick's first reflex, probably brought by his rather old-fashioned upbringing, had been to tell her to cover herself but… this wasn't the outfit of some harlot playing kinky games or a cheap costume. There was only one metal that sparkled like stars rather than shine. It was truly something out of this world that made her look like some kind of teenage goddess.

"Adamantine… a whole suit of adamantine. All the jewels in the treasure of England cannot even begin to measure up," said the Watcher.

"Artemis?" asked Elizabeth.

"I wasn't expecting this, but it looks familiar… I think Hephaestus forged this for you."

An image raced through her mind, the one of a stocky bearded man… she remembered him fondly.

"Merrick I…"

"Y… your Majesty," he said, trying to bow slightly. "I see the signs… Venus, the eight-pointed star, the lion's roar and Akkadian. You are Ishtar. The gods are walking among the men… I would like to live, to see what the new age you are heralding will bring but I know I cannot be allowed to. Even if I were to keep your secret, my order would tear it out of me. So… please do it while I still have some courage!"

"I… I, Ishtar, Queen of Venus, will grant you that wish, Merrick," she said, tears running down her cheeks.

She raised her right hand, trying not to sob. There was something forming between her fingers, a roughly spherical jumble of rotating, searing white crescents. The ball of light flew from her hand, growing as its light became blinding, engulfing Merrick. He marveled at the apparent chaos of it that was, in fact, a very complex order.

_Ishtar has always been a complicated goddess, _he thought as the heat of a star's surface vaporized him, leaving only a faint burnt trace on the floor.

"Elizabeth?" asked Artemis. "That was… Minako never had such…"

"The… Crescent Coffin, I think, but the original name is in another language. It's the Slayer. She's using her knack to master any weapon to help me with my powers."

_Come on… no time to freak on the fact you just killed a man, Lisa. What would Mom do?_

She took a deep breath.

"Artemis, you have one of those sticks for Dawn, right?"

"Yes."

"Give it to me. I'm going to save her and she will need it. Second, that magical storing thing you did with the stick, can you store something bigger?"

"Yes but…"

"I want you to go to Merrick's hotel and take anything Slayer-related. We will need that information before the police finds it. After that, find Mom and stay with her."

The cat looked at his charge and chuckled. He materialized Sailor Pluto's henshin stick, which Elizabeth quickly put in her girdle.

"And you?"

"My sister is that way… I can feel her pain," she said, waving her hand. "The world has better be ready, because here I come."

Two wings of golden, luminescent feathers, sprung from her back. With a mighty flap, she soared in the twilight sky.

_Disclaimer addenda: Part of the lyrics of the song "Radio Ga Ga" by Queen have been used in this chapter. I do not own them. _


	8. The Calling (Part III)

_Author notes: and here is the final part of 'The Calling'. I hope you will enjoy it. _

_Thanks to all the people who favorited this story. I hope to see some reviews as I am always interested on opinions on my writing, as they are the fuel to my inspiration. _

_- Babel, Kiribati, forty minutes before Ishtar's awakening -_

Usagi came out of her meditation and rubbed her three eyes. She was sitting in the lotus position under the shade of palm trees near the Residence's swimming pool.

"Computer, call Hotaru, ciphering mode B."

"Proceeding."

She got up, stretching her limbs and letting the Hawaiian shirt covering her shoulders fall on the ground, leaving her clad only in her black bikini. The afternoon was hot and she saw the small silhouettes of windsurfers, a long way below the Residence level of the Babel Arcology.

_A pity I don't have the time to…_

A hologram appeared in front of her, cutting her thoughts. Hotaru was sitting in the cabin of a plane, dressed in her usual purple pantsuit. Usagi remembered that, according to her schedule, she was en route to Bern for a meeting with representatives of the Swiss government about Apex investments in their country.

"Hotaru, phase three is imminent."

"Who?"

"Mina-chan. My calculations predict the breaking point will be reached in roughly half an hour."

"Predictable," said the vampiress, sighing. "Well, we're as ready as we can be."

"I will keep monitoring it. I'll send a summon in town to relay my power and nudge things."

"Do you want to make contact?"

"Too early. If they just have the memories of their middle lives, they'll scream 'Black Lady' as soon as they see me… "

Hotaru laughed.

"Sorry," she said. "I was just imagining Aralu… Pluto's face when she realizes we pulled on her what she used to do to us back in the eighties."

Usagi sent back the smile while pouring herself a big glass of amrita on the rocks. She grinned as she saw Hotaru's raised eyebrow.

"Cut me some slack, Taru-chan. It's not because you treat the thing like an old Scotsman would his single malt than I must do the same. Moreover… who makes hot chocolate using blood instead of milk?"

"Actually… Kokoa-chan conned me into… right, even if it was her idea, I like it… and absolutely don't expect a human to be able to stomach that stuff. For a vampire's palate though… a little like sweet and sour. Anyway, my Osprey is touching down in Belp in sixteen minutes. I have an early strategy meeting with the Japanese Ambassador before seeing the Federal Council this morning."

"Do your best to act genuinely surprised, sister. And say hello to the kids for me."

Hotaru smiled. As she was in Switzerland, Hotaru was also bound to pay a visit to the European branch of the Infinity Academy. Reopening it had necessitated a bit of courage for both of them, but, as the public never knew about the Death Busters, this was, in the end, just a brand name with a good reputation. They now had boarding schools that often doubled as orphanages all around the world. '_Le Manoir de Hauteville'_ was one of the most extensive, named after the nearby village as well as an homage to Victor Hugo. It was sitting in a large, Victorian-looking manor on the bank of the Lake of Gruyère. It was also important for another reason. Some of the girls currently studying there… needed particular attention from the sisters.

"I will. I'll let you have your fun," said Hotaru, waving goodbye to her sister.

The hologram disappeared and Usagi reached for a pouch, selecting an obsidian coin in it. Pricking her left middle finger with her thumb, she let a few drops of golden ichor flow from her veins, smearing them on a gold coin sporting a scowling crow. She remembered when Touhou Fuhai had taught her the summoning arts. He was himself more used to invoke creatures from Asia but he encouraged her to find her own style. Then, in 2008, she did a trip to Nemesis and, thanks to the work done by the terraforming robots sent by Ganesha, she discovered some things that, thankfully, escaped Wiseman. She discovered Tyche's collection of demons-in-a-coin and the instructions to summon and command them.

"Malphas, I have a mission for you."

A crow materialized in a puff of sulfur smoke.

"Yes, Mistress?"

"Malphas, your mission is to go to Los Angeles. Ishtar is about to make an appearance."

"Should I hush it, Mistress?"

"Quite the contrary. Now listen…"

_- Los Angeles, ten minutes before Ishtar's awakening -_

Joyce was waiting at the corner of a street when a grey van stopped before her. She opened the lateral door, got in and closed behind her.

"Sorry for the delay," said the Charlie Gunn while driving away.

"You are on time," she said, eying the large sports bags on the van's floor. "Don't peep too much, I need to change."

She opened one of the bags and started to undress quickly, replacing her shirt and light slacks with a dull black armored spider-silk catsuit. Having emergency bags at a trusted contact's place was an old habit of hers. In this case, it came with service.

"Antoine said that if you need the content of your house moved, he can organize it in less than 24 hours."

"Good. There is more equipment than what I asked."

"My treat. It's up to you, but I have experience with taking out bloodsuckers."

While replacing her shoes with armored, knee-high boots, she thought about including the black man in her budding plan.

"You do exactly what I say?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Kyrie. My name is Kyrie."

She put the bracers and the rest of the ceramic armor plates in place. She pushed a button on her belt, feeling the smart armor adjust herself to fit her body perfectly. She made a few moves.

_Restriction is less than in winter clothes. Good. A pity I didn't have more time to train in it._

She checked the blades. The first one was a straight, double-edged sword with a crystal blade. She remembered reading something about this material, some 'new generation carbon fiber' though the chemistry behind it eluded her. What she had retained were the mechanical properties of the material which could be summarized by better and lighter than steel. She also remembered the brand name: Glassteel, which had made Dawn laugh for several minutes, saying things about eight-level spells.

"The fun thing about glassteel is that vamps react to it like to very hard wood," said Gunn.

Joyce smirked. She had known that money was not the only reason why Gunn worked for Antoine. The other one was obviously using the old fixer's contacts and experience to develop very specific weaponry.

"You tested it?"

"Personally. My life depends on my tech being reliable… and trying to scam a samurai of your caliber is very unhealthy."

"Very good, Charlie, but I'm not a samurai. I'm my own master."

She continued to equip, putting objects looking like hockey pucks in her thigh pockets, quickly remembering their specifics. They were a new model of grenade that could also be used as a demolition charge thanks to their adhesive function. With a push on the little yellow button, an electrical current ran on the underside of the grenade, making the chemicals on it react for instant, cyanoacrylate-level, sticking.

"The word has a different meaning in the American streets, Kyrie. A street samurai is a fighter with honor, while a ronin has none. By the way… I had the sword done on a whim after the one Wesley Snipes used in Blade, but I don't have the training to use it in combat. You, on the other hand…"

Joyce tested the balance of the sword. It was lighter than a steel blade of the same size, but the balance was good. She put it in the sheath and attached it in her back, while several small throwing knifes of the same material went into various place of her armor.

She came to her main weapons. Last Friday, when she had said to her daughters that no bullet convenient enough to her tastes existed for vampire hunting… it was something that had been true in 1995.

_Though, again… I wish I had more time to test them._

She was confident enough to use her new weapons in combat situations. Gyrojets weapons were not a new concept though the original model developed back in the sixties didn't work well. It had just been too ahead of its time then. But now, the idea of a pistol firing mini-rockets had been made very attractive with the need for weapons able to function in the vacuum of space and low-gravity environments. Gyrojets had almost no recoil and the solid fuel rockets had their own oxidizer. Another fundamental point for her was that they were also a lot less noisy than ordinary firearms. The noise a standard gyrojet weapon did was similar to the one of a firework rocket taking off. With some low-velocity ammo like the one she had used to stick an emitter on the enemy vehicle, it went even lower.

_But they have their downsides too. Muzzle escape velocity is very low and the rockets only reach full speed after two meters. Not that it matters that much with what I'm packing. Those explosive, incendiary mini-rockets hit as hard as a 30mm round when they detonate. _

She put two pistols in place, one in a holster in the small of her back for left-hand access and the other on her right thigh, then added magazines in one of her pockets while she packed her last weapon: a gyrojet submachine gun. She pocketed a few other gadgets she could need.

"You will use the automatic shotgun?"

"Yes, I fire Scimitar rounds. They're basically advanced flechette rounds, guaranteed to shred a vamp's head. From what I heard, the SWAT had started to equip them to go against cyborgs."

She took the last item she needed. And put it on her right ear. The green plastic monocle interfaced with her vidphone.

_Pretty useful technology… though what pushed the people who designed it to steal its looks from Dragon Ball? My fault probably. I let Dawn handle that order. _

She studied quickly the blueprints of the old cinema where Lothos had his lair. They were probably not fully accurate anymore, but it was a start.

_An old cinema… the bills… paid by a front represented by Wolfram and Hart… why am I not surprised. _

She closed her eyes, thanking silently, for once, the hellish childhood that robbed her of her humanity. She needed to be calm and concentrated, not to let the worry she felt for Dawn cloud her judgment.

_In the ups: Dawn is probably not human enough now to be turned into a ghoul. Lothos also wants to use her gifts. He will not kill her, he will try to break her. This takes time, time he didn't have yet. The greatest danger is if he feels like he is about to lose her, he will kill her rather than let someone else have her._

_In the downs: I have an unknown number of ghouls in the opposition and no idea of Dawn's position in that building… well I had to plan for worse. _

"Gunn… I accept your offer."

- _Los Angeles Airspace, 1 October 2012 18:36_ -

Lisa resisted the envy to make barrel rolls and other aerial maneuvers, to just fly around. She had a mission.

_I feel the general direction but… a pity I cannot access my vidphone and check Mom's frequency from… Minute, I remember something…_

She thought in way similar to the one she did when she used her virtual helmet. A kind of golden visor appeared before her eyes. She remembered something from Minako. Sailor Mercury often used the same kind of thing.

"Computer, can you access my vidphone?"

"Annu," replied a cultured male voice.

"I have my own Jarvis. Wicked. Can you speak English? My Akkadian is too rusty."

"Updating language parameters… accessing Terran computer network for information update… Your comparison is appropriate. My designation is Arges. Your armor possesses a tachyon transmission link to my late master's laboratory. I will display a map of this city and your position."

"In my phone, there is a message for a frequency about a tracer… can you display its position too?"

"Easily. Given the content of the message, I will also add the position signal of the sender."

The view on the visor updated.

"What else can you do?"

"May things, though my capacities are currently limited by the virus affecting your estate's central AI, designation Ninshubur."

"Can you help her?" she said, remembering that her assistant – or was it Prime Minister? – was a girl AI.

"Yes, but I am lacking the proper authorizations."

She took deep breath, hoping she was not about to make a very big mistake.

"I give you the authorization: use whatever means necessary to set things right in my estate."

"Acknowledged."

As she flew, she felt a memory unlocking. It wasn't the first time she went to rescue her sister…

- _Somewhere in Central Asia, the antediluvian era_ -

The boxy assault shuttle was dancing through the canyons. In the cockpit, the pilot was chewing her gum with calm, as if she was flying in an empty sky rather that racing like mad through valleys were her vehicle barely fitted. The sandy blonde woman called Alcyone prided herself to be the best pilot in the world… even before the invasion killed a lot of her competition.

"It will be calmer for the next six minutes!" she shouted at the attention of the armored people in the hold. A pretty blonde with blue eyes raised her thumb with a smirk.

"My species is used to fly on its own," said a woman with aquamarine hair and black, reptilian eyes sitting next to the blonde, "but I swear to the Great Egg! This human will have my scales."

"Relax, Duma," said the blonde, using her nickname for her currently human-shaped dragon sister-in-arms. "Alcyone is the best at what she does."

The woman sighed. Her real name wasn't pronounceable for human lips but it could be translated by 'Princess Luminous Jewel'. Ishtar had almost immediately nicknamed her 'Duma' after a word meaning jewel in her native language.

"I know, Ishtar… it's just that she's the most infuriating…"

"Yet I saw you two hold hands while taking a stroll on the beach of the Inner Sea…" replied the blonde with an impish grin.

"I… the alliance between our clans has not been easy and I am only doing my duty by…"

"Sure," said Ishtar, nodding, a smile on her lips.

Teasing the gentle dragon princess was decidedly too much fun, particularly when she was blushing so nicely. The fact she didn't know very well how to handle the reactions of her human shape yet helped too.

"Aren't you…." asked Duma, wanting to change the subject.

"Impatient? Definitely. For more than twenty years, I have thought that my sister was dead… in a way that would have been better than… that."

Duma put her hand on the shoulder of her friend. She had learnt the story since their clan had decided to flee the slavery of the Old Ones and ally themselves with the humans of Hyperborea. The cost had been at the same time light and heavy. Using sorceries unknown to her people, the human scientist Sarasvati had saved her brother, giving him a new life as a spirit in a fantastic machine. He was now reborn, manifesting as one of these ghosts of light the humans called holograms, taking the shape of an eight-headed serpent.

"We'll get Aralu out of there, Ishtar."

"Thanks, Duma. Let's hope that Sarasvati's toys will make the difference," said the blonde, rising her right arm that was covered with a crystal-laced gauntlet.

It had already been two years since the Order of Dusk opened the Hellgates, two years since the demented abominations called the Old Ones started to conquer the world. Already, all that was left of civilization were a few carefully hidden pockets of resistance, like Hyperborea.

Ishtar remembered bitterly when she and others had tried to warn the Svargan government about the Order's projects. It had only been to be told in barely veiled terms that people like her were unstable and should be put back in a camp.

_Like I could help what they did to me…_

She remembered her parents being shot before her when she was four and the Thulans taking her and her sister. They told her it was an honor, that she would help to better the human race. For the three next years, she and the other kids in the camp became guinea pigs. Ishtar remembered the other children dying one after the other until they were only a handful left, among which Sarasvati and her sister Aralu. She also remembered when she had ceased to be normal, when, for the first time, the light had started to bend to her will.

_Then it had been the attack… Kali's Tiger Guard stormed the base to free us… but some of the Thulans flew, taking my sister away, because of what they had awakened in her._

She remembered the notes they had found shortly before the Gates opened, rambling about her sister being some kind of ultimate key that would allow the Order to avenge the Thulan Empire. Three days ago, they had found the coordinates where her sister was still held, her talent powering the Hellgates.

She straightened herself as the red light blinked near the shuttle's exit. She looked towards the front, in the cockpit. A maelstrom of ghostly green light stretched the horizon. She looked at her fellow warriors: Duma, Thor, Marduk, Tyche and Anhur, plus Alcyone as a pilot. All of them knew the stakes. It was not only the matter of saving Aralu. She was irreplaceable. Without her the Old Ones would lose the ability to travel back and forth to their home dimension. General Kali's orders had been clear: if Aralu could not be extracted, she was to be killed.

_Sarasvati says she is the key to victory, that through her we will be able to access the fabled Cauldron of Stars… but for me… Be strong Aralu… I'm coming. Your sister Ishtar will go into hell itself to save you. _

_- Near Lothos' lair, 1 October 2012, 18h38 - _

Lisa landed on the roof of a tower dominating her target. She would have to fly more, just for the fun of it, but now was not the time.

"Arges, do I have sensors in this armor? More precisely, can you show me the magical auras in the building I'm looking at?" she asked, remembering that Mercury used her computer to analyze their enemies.

"Yes, one instant."

Inverted triangles appeared in her field of vision, most of them harboring complex signs.

"Mark the ghouls… they're demon-animated corpses in yellow and Aralu in red. Can you detect if there are humans?"

"No, unless they have magical auras."

"Okay, then mark anything else is in green."

Her vision adjusted. Her sister was in the back while Lothos was probably in the upper offices of what she thought to be an old cinema. She noted a green triangle corresponding to a van in a nearby alley. The position also coincided with her Mom's vidphone.

"Mark this one in… white. The codename for this signature is Kyrie. Open vidphone channel, number in memory indicated as 'Mom'."

A circular window soon opened in her field of view, her mother at the center.

"Lisa. What's your position?"

"On the white tower near the target building, M… Kyrie. Arges, can you transmit my tactical data to Kyrie's interface?" she asked, seeing the monocle on her right eye.

"Proceeding, Ishtar. I need a few seconds to code an interface software."

"Arges… one of Hephaestus' Cyclopes," said Joyce. "A… very old AI friend?"

"Yes… Artemis gave me the item. It was the only solution. Kyrie, I'm transmitting sensor data. The ghouls are in yellow, sister in red and me in blue."

"I'll send you the building's blueprints. Arges, can you update the data in a comprehensive view?"

"Yes, Kyrie," replied the AI. "Extrapolating tridimensional structure… complete. If you and your assistant leave your channels open, I can continue to centralize and actualize the data in real time."

"Kyrie," said Ishtar. "As Lothos doesn't know about you, I propose a two-pronged attack. I will enter through the skylight of the main hall and attract most of the opposition to me. In the meantime, you storm the back entrance and go straight to Dawn."

"Risky for you but probably the best given we're in a hurry… Lisa, no heroics. You feel overpowered and you retreat. From your position I suppose you can fly now?"

"Yes, Mom."

"Then use that advantage. One last point: Merrick."

"I did… what was necessary," she said, holding back her tears.

"Good… honey, I know it must feel wrong to you but…"

"Mom, I… I'm beginning to remember and… I understand."

"I'm proud of you, Ishtar. We'll talk about it later… over ice cream."

Lisa pinched the bridge of her nose. Images of a mother cat complimenting her kitten for her first kill came to her mind. She knew that her mother was right. She wasn't living in the comfortable world of an insouciant teenager anymore. She lived in a world were life-and-death decisions were made every day, a world whose morals had little to do with the ones of peaceful, law-abiding citizens.

_The worse being that I can feel that little part of me liking it… _

The teen looked downwards and smiled. It was perfect, she had a straight line to the van where her Mom was hiding.

"Mom, I'm sending you Dawn's henshin stick. Once she has it in hand, she'll know what to do."

Lisa took the item in her hand and concentrated, calling on her ancient memories. Contrarily to her sister, she couldn't teleport. But, in the long millennia of her existence as Ishtar, she had found… a workaround. All of her powers had one common point: light. It was always about light, or rather electromagnetism, with her magic.

The Henshin stick started to float in her hand, becoming brighter with every second until it disappeared in a flash.

_- In an alley near the cinema, at the same time - _

There was a sudden flash of light as a pink, white and golden scepter appeared on the ground, leaving a slightly burnt mark.

"How?" asked Charlie.

"Magic."

Gunn nodded but he was feeling that something was wrong. He didn't know much about magic, but he knew enough to understand that casting a spell was a lot less easy than in Harry Potter. Most of the time, you needed long rituals and special components. Also… he would have liked to know how this 'Arges' had sensors that could detect vamps through walls.

"Quick question: ghoul is your name for vamps?"

"Yes. I'll explain why later."

Joyce took the scepter and led the way until they reached a rear alley.

"Arges, do you see the camera above the door?"

"Yes. Unfortunately, this system is not linked to the Net and I cannot hack it."

"Can you reconstruct an image of what it should see if the alley is empty?"

"Easily."

"Good".

She took a compact out of her pocket and clicked on it. A robotic wasp took flight while the compact acted as a control console. Gunn grinned. He recognized one of the spy microbots he had sold her. Among other things, it was equipped for creating bypasses on security systems. Joyce connected the compact on her vidphone.

"I have control of the drone," said Arges.

The wasp flew towards the door and bit the camera's transmission cable.

"Substituting signal… complete."

Gunn watched with interest as he saw her look at the door, then 'draw' the shape of a door in the larger fire exit with thermite paste and stick a radio controlled detonator in it.

"Kyrie to Ishtar. We're in position."

"Roger. I'm attacking."

_- Above the cinema, 18:45 - _

_Saint Batman, please keep an eye on this rookie hero… _thought Elizabeth as she retracted her wings and dropped from the sky.

The old skylight shattered under her weight. She expected the glass to cut the places where her flesh was bare but, just as her instincts, or maybe the Slayer in her, had told her, her armor's appearance and its actual protection were two distinct things.

She could feel the gaze of the ghouls in the hall gathering on her as she received herself with cat-like grace, shattered glass creating a sparkling shower around her. She almost expected the Slayer to roar in anticipation, but she felt calm and concentrated. In fact, since her transformation in Ishtar, the Slayer felt different, less… wild. She was glad about it. The first time, when she faced Lothos, losing herself into pure reflex had been far too easy. What she intended to do needed intelligence, not instinct.

A thought and her chain girdle unlocked, lengthening as she took it in her hands. During the last month, she had trained with the traditional Japanese weighted chain, as Artemis had told her she used that kind of weapon as Sailor Venus. As with the other weapons when she trained with her Mom, the Slayer gave her an instinctive basic knowledge on how to use it. Here, it was even easier because all the Slayer had to do was to help her remember. But the 'Venus-Love-Me' Chain wasn't an ordinary length of metal rings. It had a way to react to the desires of its wielder, a wielder that had, since she had known about that point, spent many hours watching an anime with a character called Shun of Andromeda.

The chain of interlocked hearts darted forward, lengthening as its end morphed into a spear's head. It made a strangely musical noise, more reminiscent of little bells than of clicking metal as it impaled a ghoul straight through the heart. Still holding a length between her two hands, she quickly moved, using it as a garrote. Normally, she would have scoffed at the futility to strangle something that didn't breathe but she had taken a bet on something. She smirked as the undead flesh the chain was touching started to burn, allowing her to behead the beast.

"Seems like I'm too holy for you!"

She could feel the gaze of the others. She had managed to be lethal but without making it so that coming at her looked completely futile. They were now taking things to beat on her without touching her and were arriving as a pack. She smiled as she continued to fight, voluntarily 'dumbing' her capacities down. She had to buy time and attract the opposition here, not to send them running to the back door. So, for now, she would calmly dust them one by one, letting them believe they had a chance.

_- The cinema's rear exit, 18:45 - _

Kyrie pushed the button of the controller and kicked through the shape the explosive had just cut in the door. Three more drone wasps flew in front of her, controlled by Arges and completing the tactical data with their own sensors. She felt all of her old combat reflexes coming back at full speed. She fell in that state Lisa had nicknamed the 'Soul of Ice', the one where she became a killing machine.

Yellow triangles started to move on her monocle and she mentally noted the close correspondence with the killing intent spikes she was feeling. She sent a grenade in the stairs to her left, the ones leading down to the cellar, timed to explode when the yellow triangles would reach it.

Almost at the same time, her submachine gun aimed forward, sending a short burst in the ghoul rushing toward her in the hall. The armor-piercing, explosive minirockets shattered its pelvis, sending him tumble towards her. She finished it with a single round at the base of the skull, dusting the ghoul.

She heard the grenade explode and saw from the corner of her eyes that Gunn was covering the stairs, finishing anything coming up. It was good as she had five signals coming forward. On the monocle, Arges was actualizing the data. They had started with thirty-eight ghouls in the building which, according to Lorne's information, was around two thirds of the ones in Los Angeles. Lothos liked to have his 'court' near him. They were now down to 29 and still going, many blips on the map disappearing from the main hall.

A full auto burst cut the monsters' charge while she took the crystalline sword out of its sheath. A precise move and the blade severed the head of a ghoul while she fired a short burst at point blank in another.

A step, gliding under the slam of the third one and a slash severed its ankles' tendons, making it lose its balance. She shifted her grip on the sword, stabbing downward, straight through its neck, severing the spine. At the same time, her right hand flashed forward, the palm crushing the nose of the fourth, sending bone fragments through the dead brain of the creature. It distracted the ghoul just long enough for another sword slash to behead it.

The fifth one had gotten a hold of the submachine gun she had discarded and was trying to fire at her. It screamed as the weapon's security failed to recognize the identity chip in her glove and tasered him. A sword slash severed the hand holding the SMG and a vicious kick in the back of the knees made it fall. One last slash and the ghoul fell to dust like the others while Kyrie took her weapon back.

Behind her, Gunn's lips formed a silent 'wow'. Vamps… or ghouls as she called them were faster and stronger than humans. She made them look like pathetic clowns.

_And her eyes… no fear, no hate, nothing. Just blue ice. _

"Are you… human?"

"I am neither a demon nor an android," she said with a smile.

_Okay then she's an alien… _

"I feel a strong killing intent coming this way… probably Amilyn, Lothos' right hand man. I'll cover the access to the room where they keep Dawn while you go fetch her," she said while handing him the henshin stick. "If you need reinforcements, make it so she can have it in her hand."

_- Near the rear entrance, 18:51 - _

"So it was you," said Amilyn as he reached the place where she was waiting, the dust of all the minions he had sent forward around her. "The girl who dusted Knox has become a woman… and a mother."

He smiled. She was truly magnificent to him, one of those new crystal swords in her hand. He remembered when he had desired her, wanted to sire her.

"Yes, it was me."

"I don't suppose you will tell me who hired you and your sisters to destroy Knox and his gang."

"No, I won't."

"I smell someone else. You sent him to the seer while you stay here to stop me."

"Yes. Now I will kill you, for Dawn."

She glided forward, almost a blur and he barely raised his cavalry saber to parry her sword. He called on all the reflexes he had learnt as a mercenary during the Hundred Years War and honed in the centuries since Lothos turned him. He could feel the crackle of magic in her aura, the one that sent back to the stories of his native Ireland, to names like Scáthach and Cú Chulainn.

They exchanged a few strikes, each of them looking for weaknesses in the other's stance. He knew that his best chance was to temporize, to let her exhaust the magic that allowed her to rival his vampiric speed and strength. He also knew that she knew it and wouldn't allow him to stay on the defensive.

She went once again into attack and he smiled as he could already feel her aura weaken. It was true that she was older and the previous fights had probably taken out a lot her reserves already. Finally, he saw an opening, a move that got just a little too slow. He jumped into it, immobilizing her sword arm and absorbing easily the weak strike to the side his head. She had only managed to numb a little his sense of touch in that area.

A second later, her aura flared, coming back at full strength as she flipped backwards, evading his grip. She waved him goodbye, a cat-like grin on her lips. He realized that there was something fixed to his skull, an object that felt like some kind of hockey puck and whose weight he had not felt… because of his vampiric strength.

Guessing what it was, he tried to rip the item off his head, not caring if he tore the skin with it. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw her press a red button on a small remote. In the last instant of his undeath, he knew that she could have killed him without him even knowing she was here. She had wanted him to know fear. He now understood why his master had told him that people like her were not to be turned. Ever.

_- Hollywood Boulevard, 18:52 - _

Kate Lockley was driving quickly, siren blazing. A few minutes ago, a patrol car had called for reinforcements about a firefight in an old cinema of Hollywood Boulevard. She had been nearby to see one of her contacts and that old cinema was a place she had heard rumors about, though not enough to obtain a search warrant.

She parked her car near one of the patrol cars in front of the cinema.

"How is it Solomon?"

"I don't know, Kate," replied the uniformed officer. "It could have been a hoax. The car calling us here doesn't exist but now I think I heard explosives coming from the inside. On the fun side, a witness told me he saw an angel descend on that place and crash through the ceiling."

"Really? The SWAT?"

"On its way, but will not arrive until a while."

Lockley opened the trunk of her car. She still had some time to put her armored vest. On a nearby building, a crow watched the scene with great interest.

_- Inside the cinema, 18:55 - _

As she saw the others reach a certain position on her screen, Ishtar smiled. It was time to raise the stakes. Her right hand pointed at them, though not exactly as she remembered Minako doing it. She was pointing her index and middle finger at the group of ghouls, feeling the trigger in her mind. Contrarily to Minako, she had no need to use words for the technique known as 'Crescent Beam Shower'.

A baseball-sized sphere of blinding white light had pooled at the tip of her extended fingers. Another act of will and it exploded forward, forming a cone of crisscrossing white rays, like if lasers ricocheted inside of a mirror cone. Ishtar thought distractedly that it didn't look exactly like the attack she remembered using as Minako. It didn't really matter. What mattered was that each of the ray was several thousand degrees hot and cut through anything it hit like a plasma blowtorch. She saw the shock on the ghouls' face as they were incinerated too quickly to utter a sound.

_And contrarily to what I remember from Minako, there is also a lot more property damage. _

The concrete floor was like hesitating between burning and being reduced to slag while the counter at the end of her attack's area had been vaporized. She would really have to pay attention to bystanders when using it.

She hastily raised her arms in a parry as she felt a pressure wave coming. At the other end of the room, Lothos, his black aura flaring like mad, was just finishing a swipe of his sword.

_- Inside the cinema, the torture room, 18:51 - _

Dawn was feeling light-headed because of the blood loss but her thoughts were also cleared than they had ever been. The shock of Lothos' bite, then that familiar energy nearing… It had unlocked something in her. She looked at Kimberly.

"A pity... her most probable future would have been for her to reflect on what happened and choose to rejoin Lisa and I. She would have become a fine engineer and raised a family on Mars. But now… all of this is lost."

"I'm…"

"You are not her. Her soul is gone. You are just a usurper."

Kimberly slapped the chained Dawn, hard. She couldn't stand the way the greenhead was looking at her, like if she was dirt. She went to the door. She needed to get out before she did something Master Lothos would make her regret. As she saw the door opening and a black man in commando gear, a shotgun in hand, she plunged behind one of the room's tables. The two others that had been in the room with her had no such luck. Just as she expected, the door to the minions' dorm opened, allowing for some of them to come in his back.

He was coming in the room, probably to give himself more space, the other minions on his heels when a half-foot long item suddenly haloed in amethyst light and flew… right toward the similar glow in Dawn's right hand.

"I still have the time to kill you!" yelled Kimberly as she ran towards the green-haired teen.

Gunn started to move, cursing. He had thought this one wounded enough not to be able to move. His angle wasn't good and if he fired now, he would almost surely hit Kyrie's daughter… and facing this mother's wrath was not something he wanted to consider, not after seeing her plow through those vamps in the entrance. Then he saw the magic scepter in her hand and her smile.

Her lips started to move at impossible speed. It was like seeing a movie in fast forward. The sound coming out of it was a screech so high-pitched it made his ears ring with blank noise. He immediately thought of a dog whistle and saw that Kimberly was clutching her ears as her enhanced senses made her vulnerable to the ultrasounds. In Dawn's still chained right hand, the pink, white and gold stick turned to dust blown away by a ghost wind, leaving a black and garnet rod with a serpent head at each end.

"I AM THE KEY AND THE GATE!"

The manacles and the chains started to rust. It was as if centuries of old age were hitting them in a matter of seconds and they soon fell in reddish dust. Dawn started to float, haloed in garnet light, a ghost wind whose sound felt like the moans of the damned blowing through the room. His vision blurred in an amethyst void as she made a wave of her hand in his direction.

He wasn't sure what was happening but he could hear the ghouls in the room scream. Less than thirty seconds later, the mist disappeared and he saw her. She was still floating, though the red light had disappeared and she was wearing… what he had to call a fraggin' superhero costume.

First came the body-hugging dress, the one of some fantasy enchantress, with short sleeves and a high cut on both sides of her legs. At first, he thought it was black with gems fixed in the cloth… until the 'gems' started to move, letting see stars and nebulae as if the dress was an open window on some distant point in space. Then came the armor pieces. Bracers, pauldrons and knee-high boots, all crafted in a strange, sparkly black metal. They had sharp angles and were adorned with dark red lines whose motif felt even more mind-hurting than an Escher drawing to him. A large, dark red belt of the same sparkly metal hugged her waist. It had many small pouches that made him think of Batman but, given her overall appearance, were maybe for spell components. A black tiara adorned with a single garnet shaped like an eight turned on the side held her emerald hair.

He finally managed to tear his gaze from her and to look around. The torture instruments, walls and floor were… distorted, making angles that… he never had thought he would ever say that about masonry, but the walls just felt wrong, their angles unnatural. His gaze then fell on the ghouls. There had been five, four coming after him plus that girl that was running on the greenhead. The girl was missing, probably gone with the missing parts of the instruments that had been too near of Dawn. Two of the others were prostrated, completely catatonic. Another was sobbing and taking a chair's wooden leg to stake itself.

"Yog-Sothoth knows the gate… Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and the guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth," mumbled the last ghoul, looking at Dawn with mad eyes.

Dawn made a gesture and a silver staff materialized in her hand. It had parts that made it look like a kind of key and its appearance made the muttering ghoul wail of terror.

"Key staff: reset to default configuration," said Dawn.

The heart ensnaring the garnet orb at the top of the staff morphed in two snakes facing each other, their tails coiling around the staff in a way similar to a caduceus. Dawn smiled as she leaned on the item.

"What… what are you?" asked Gunn.

"A moment, there is an annoying noise… Dead scream."

Black and amethyst mist spiraled around the staff's orb, forming a ringed sphere of blinding violet light. With a wave, she sent it in the direction of the three prostrated ghouls. A second later, all that was left was a perfectly cut hole in the ground and nearby wall, as if matter just… disappeared.

"So, you're… Void. Guess it goes with your Mom being Sister Zealot," he said, remembering a comic he liked when he was younger.

"Does that make you Grifter?" asked Dawn with a grin.

"No time to chat," said Joyce as she entered the room. "We have to finish cleaning up, then help Ishtar against Lothos."

Dawn started to speak in a language reminding Gunn of Hebrew and he saw his submachine gun cover with glowing red cuneiform characters that soon disappeared.

"I enchanted your weapons. Their bullets are now as lethal to ghouls as they are to humans."

"Now, that's magic I like," said Gunn, grinning.

_- Hollywood Boulevard, 18:55 -_

The old cinema's front wall exploded, fragments falling all over Hollywood Boulevard. There was a loud metallic noise as something golden incrusted itself in the side of a car parked on the other side of the street.

"Ouch… that hurt," said a voice coming from said car.

Lockley gaped as she saw a blonde girl in a golden armor that looked straight out of a superhero comics extract herself from the vehicle's ruin with only a few scratches.

"Okay…" continued the girl. "The gloves are off…"

The girl roared. Lockley had no other name for it. Golden flames surged around her and started to whirl in a small tornado as her scratches healed. A fine, typical she-devil tail sprung from her back while her ears became more pointed and four fine black horns came out of her head. The first pair were planted slightly above her brow and followed her skull before pointing slightly upwards after reaching the top of her head. The second pair was planted behind them and more apart, twisting in a way similar to the ones of a ram.

There was a sudden metallic noise as a longsword clashed with the golden chain she had raised to parry a blow aimed for her head. Something had moved, too fast to be seen. It had the shape of a man but Lockley knew that the creature with the bestial face was no more human than the devil girl he was fighting. She only had to look at his dead, yellow eyes to feel the pure, inhuman hate in them.

"Your life is not a blink of my eye, spawn of Lilith! I bathed in the blood of emperors and lived for longer that…" said the man.

"You know nothing, ghoul… you are a stain on the House of Kali that I will cleanse tonight," replied the girl with a smirk.

Gold and black auras clashed as each of them tried to overpower the other. Lockley felt like if her arms and legs were made of lead and she soon saw the ground below the combatants crease as the pressure increased. Suddenly it disappeared as they broke contact, standing a few meters apart. The man was keeping a high guard with his sword while the chain of the girl raised its spear-shaped end on its own, reminding the policewoman of a cobra readying to strike.

_And still both of them lighted with a visible aura like fuckin' characters in one of those Japanese cartoons!_

"I have a new game for you," said the man as other creatures with bestial faces came out of the cinema, aiming for the bystanders that had, maybe understandably but quite stupidly, been watching the show slack-jawed.

The girl scowled as she waved her left arm, the arm the chain was attached to. The sentient weapon started to move, lengthening to more than a dozen of meters to spear one of the creatures through the heart before it could reach a civilian. It immediately started to burn and fell into dust as the chain aimed towards its next target.

Kate rose as she saw that it was only a diversion, only a way to force the devil girl to choose between her own defense and the protection of innocents. The blonde hastily parried a swipe of the sword with her right forearm, the golden armor cracking as blood flew.

Lockley aimed for one of the human-shaped beasts, putting three bullets in its body without even slowing it.

_At least, it's coming on me, _she thought as she saw the monster abandon its previous target. 

She heard a sound. At first, she thought it was too muffled for gunfire then she remembered the demonstration made by the SWAT about those new Gyrojet weapons. Something glowing with a dark red light impacted the creature on the side, leaving only dust.

Lockley turned her head, looking at the hole in the cinema's wall. A white-haired woman in a black catsuit and dark red duster coat, a red tactical monocle on her right eye, was busy firing with two futuristic-looking pistols.

"Ishtar!" said the woman. "Take out Lothos, I'll neutralize the riffraff."

"On, it, Kyrie!" replied the golden warrior.

The monster with the sword made a swipe with his sword, unleashing a kind of black, cone-like wave that shattered everything it touched. The she-devil immediately riposted by pointing her fingers, searing white rays of light rushing to intercept the wave.

The energies clashed, pulverizing the street below them and sending the patrol cars parked nearby flying. Lockley suddenly saw the gunslinger woman jump and roll with the shockwave, making a screen of her body to a child that had taken refuge under one of the now blown away cars. She saw her wince as shrapnel cut through her coat and blood started to seep.

"Run, kiddo," said Kyrie.

At the center of the battle, the she-devil was attacking with renewed ferocity, searching for close combat, probably to prevent him from unleashing another of those wave attacks. Finally, a punch managed to knock the sword away while the chain retrieved it quickly.

"Endgame, Lothos," said Ishtar, her right hand spearing right through the monster's chest, who started to burn and fall to dust.

_- Space-time coordinates: irrelevant -_

In a misty void only marked by an intricate, double door, Dawn put her dress' hood, letting her face be covered in magical darkness with only her eyes showing like amethyst stars. Their original battle armors were more powerful than the Sailor fuku but they lacked one of their features. In the old times, they had no need to hide their identities and they therefore didn't have a protective glamour. With her visor and her body going full succubus, Lisa should be safe enough and she had covered her Mom and Gunn with illusions of Zealot and Grifter expies.

She looked at the tactical data now showing before her eyes. They were almost done… almost, because she…

"Because I am about to spit on Nature's laws once again…"

The bottom of her staff hit the ground and she heard the click of a key in a lock. The doors opened silently and she gazed through them, using her thoughts to direct them. She knew that this place was just a way for her still mostly human mind to fathom what her 'Overself' could do. She also knew that most of the taboos that Sailor Pluto had with time manipulation were self-inflicted, a way for herself to prevent damage to the timestream. As the fully reborn Aralu, as Ereshkigal, she had no need for such safeguards.

_But I have other duties to attend… duties I took to redeem myself, to wash my honor of the role I played in the Coming of the Old Ones. _

She concentrated, finding what she wanted in the maze of space-time and called. She grabbed it and brought it in the misty non-space where the Gates of Time stood.

"Kimberly Watts," she said in an unnaturally grave voice to the ghostly, crying shape of a girl.

"The monster, the vampire. He… forced me to drink, told me it would make me immortal. He was lying. I felt it enter my body and kick me out…"

"Yes, it is what happens with ghouls. People die and something else usurps her body."

"I'm dead, right? You're… well I didn't imagine you exactly like this."

"I am not Death, but Ereshkigal, Goddess of the Underworld. I came to offer you a choice, Kimberly."

She struck the ground once again with the bottom of her staff, causing the Time Gates to duplicate.

"If you take the left door, you will go the afterlife and face your judgment. If you take the right one, I will resurrect you. However, this is not without price."

In this place, Dawn could easily see in Kimberly's soul. The name of Ereshkigal meant nothing to her, but… Dawn had to call on all of her self-control not to giggle.

She had expected Kimberly to think about the Greek mythology they saw in class or maybe Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies she knew Kim had seen with Lisa.

The fact was that the thoughts that were going through Kimberly's mind were a whole lot different, referring to something she had made her little brother swear not to tell anyone about. It referred to video datachips borrowed from said brother's collection and words like 'Soul Society', 'Senkaimon', 'Toshiro Hitsugaya', the latter being closely related to the concept of 'dream boyfriend'. In that area, Ereshkigal was now linked to other words, the main one being 'Arrancar' accompanied by a question mark.

_An assumption I will have to correct… _

"I… I don't have much to give."

"I said I would resurrect you, not that you would be free, Kimberly. Yours is a choice I already offered to many souls before yours, the choice to join the Utukki. While you will look human, you will not be one of them. Most of the time, you will be allowed to live your life but, sometimes…"

"You will call me and I will have no other choice than to obey my queen, right?"

"Right."

"You won't make me do horrible things? I don't want to become a monster."

_What to tell her… let's be somewhat honest._

"I have been absent for a long time and have yet to restore the full might of the Utukki. In the ancient times, my agents had many roles. One is to keep watch on the Deeper Well of Irkalla, Tartarus for the Greeks, but it will not concern you. As you will live among the mortals, your role will be, once you are trained, to enforce peace between the living and the dead. Hunting ghouls and other undead abominations will fall into your attributions."

"Shinigami… you want me to become a shinigami," she said with visible relief.

Dawn could not prevent a little smile as she saw Kimberly picture herself in a black kimono… and wondered if she needed to take kendo lessons.

"This is the Japanese name for my people. What is your choice?"

"Well," she said, pointing the left door. "I've been… not very nice so I suppose it's hell for me behind this one."

_Surely, if that is what you believe you deserve, _thought Dawn as Kimberly moved towards the right one.

Unable to resist anymore, Dawn manifested a black butterfly in front of the girl.

"It will guide you to where you need to be," she said as the ghost disappeared through the right door.

Dawn extended her power. Kimberly would be found by the police, left barely alive on the heap of discarded 'meals' in the basement. She would have to organize a way to train her… later.

_Good that they kept it there… any sympathy the public could have for the ghouls will be cut down by the torture room and the corpses. I will take care of her original, ghoulified body later… if I can find where I sent it. _

She left the timeless, misty void, regaining the physical world. 

_- Hollywood Boulevard, 18:59 -_

"Lo… lower your chain and…" said Lockley.

"Are we under arrest?" replied Ishtar, a smile on her lips, while her chain coiled back in its girdle form around her waist, adding a scabbard to hold the sword of Attila.

After what she had seen, the detective doubted that anything short of a powered armor platoon could take her down but…

"I… we need to clarify the situation and…"

The detective saw another gunslinger with a red mask and blonde hair come help Kyrie to get up and rejoin the golden she-devil. Suddenly, a woman in a black starry, hooded dress holding a silver staff materialized near them.

"Aralu," said the she-devil, "Can you be a dear and teleport us elsewhere?"

"Of course. Here…"

There was an intense red flash and they disappeared, leaving shocked humans staring at the demolished street.

_- The Warehouse, Glendale, 19:01 -_

"… we are," said Dawn as they materialized in the warehouse.

Lisa quickly helped Gunn to settle her mother on the couch and removed the armor. Charlie winced as he saw the gashes in her back.

"We should bring her to the hospital."

"No need," said Lisa. "The armor took the worst, but the spine is damaged. Dawn…"

"Here," said the greenhead, handing her something looking like a first aid kit.

Taking a capsule of blue liquid, she opened it and spread its content on the wound. Gunn blinked as he saw the liquid start to glow and creep by itself in the wound, soon forming a film covering it.

"Lisa-chan, are you sure this… Vorlon first aid kit is designed for humans? I'm starting to feel stoned," said Joyce.

"Sorry, okaasan, but regenerating the nerves would hurt like hell without this," replied the teen.

Lisa broke another capsule, adding it on the wound while she looked at some data in a small computer that was part of the kit.

"Here, all set. Just rest for half an hour and you'll be good. Now, up to you," she said, turning to Gunn.

"What is it, nanotechnology?"

"No… sorry but I currently don't remember how this works exactly. What I can tell you for sure is that it's not mini-robots playing surgeon. The blue glow is a… let's say magical healing radiation," said Lisa.

"Even if Lisa remembered all of the specifics," said Dawn who was busy making sandwiches, "she would need weeks of intensive lessons to make you understand it. To keep things simple: what you call magic is our science."

"Got it. Like your mother said, Vorlon science. You're so advanced that we cannot understand how your things work… and I bet our ancestors were so awed by what you could do that they worshipped you as gods… Hell, I'm surely awed."

"Something like this."

"I will be curious to see the news in a little while, but right now, I just want to replace the blood that leech took," said Dawn, biting in a sandwich while she brought the others to the living room's coffee table.

"We messed up with the whole secrecy thing, right?" said Lisa.

"What's done is done," said Joyce.

"It's not that bad," said Gunn. "Let's think a little. One, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. I have a lot of contacts in the street gangs and most of them know about the supernatural. Believe me, a lot of them were raising beers and cheering you while you beat the crap out of Lothos. Too many of them lost people because of him. The main thing is that some supernatural factions have an interest in keeping things quiet."

"Or to quote… don't remember who right now: 'the devil's greatest trick is to make us believe he doesn't exist'," said Joyce

"Speaking of 'she-devils' that brings me to the 'two' of what I was saying earlier. A very good thing about what happened is that with Ishtar and you here taking blows rather than let bystanders get injured and it going on TV, people will understand there are good demons. By the way of which…"

"I'm a succubus… and no, I don't need to feed on souls. My species just happens to have… greater needs and probably too much endurance for you humans," said Lisa, hiding her blushing face in her hands.

"Lisa… are that tail and those horns to stay?" asked Joyce.

"I… let's see."

Lisa concentrated, sending the armor back to storage. She squirmed a little, but the devilish appendages were still here.

"Sorry my… underwear is not designed for my tail," she said, red as a tomato.

"That will pose a problem," said Gunn.

"Not that much," said Joyce. "I think I know someone who could arrange the thing. Gunn, that leads us to another problem… You know a lot about us."

"I give you my word not to say anything to anyone outside of this room."

"And I hear that oath," said Dawn, the orb on her staff flaring for an instant.

"Let me guess… I break my word and many horrible things will happen?"

"Yes."

He looked at her. If the secret had not been so enormous, he would have objected but here…

"What will you do now? Disappear?" he asked.

"Not immediately, it would be too suspicious," said Dawn as she reverted back to her 'civilian' guise and went to take in her arms the white cat that had just entered the warehouse.

"Good to see you're thinking," said Joyce. "With the divorce, we have officially been thinking about moving anyway. So that's what we will do, in a few weeks."

"Where?"

"My great-grandfather had a manor not too far away. Something about him helping to found the town in 1899. It's probably not well-maintained, but we still own it. A bonus is that the peculiar nature of that town will make magical detection difficult."

"What's the name of this place?" asked Lisa.

"Sunnydale."

_- Castle Magellan, orbit of Venus, ten hours later -_

Guardian Venus was feeling excited. After all these years, she had felt Sailor Venus transform but… there was something strange. It wasn't totally unfamiliar, like an old, half-forgotten memory. She sighed, wondering if she should not go back to sleep until her mistress remembered she existed. It wasn't like if there was much to…

"What?"

There was something strange too about the planet below. There was an increase in planet-wide volcanic activity and… she projected her senses below the planet's crust, modeling the magma flows. She could feel powerful magic at work, redirecting them. She could also feel a conscience behind that, something old that was acting from a place below the planet's surface.

"Who are you?" she said, sending a contact probe to the entity.

"My designation is Arges. Sorry about this but the Queen gave me orders to set everything back into shape."

"The Queen? What does Selene…"

She screamed as her mind was assaulted. She felt her memories being copied and then… her perceptions dimmed and she felt herself fall asleep. She wasn't sure. She couldn't control herself. The stranger's power over her was too great. Somehow, she knew she should have been able to repel him easily, but she had forgotten how… She closed her eyes and knew no more.

In the castle's study, holograms appeared above the desk Minako Aino had briefly used during her tenure as Sailor Venus.

… MEMORY PURGE: COMPLETE

… RESTORE BACKUP: COMPLETE

… REBOOT MAIN CORE

The AI called Ninshubur felt her systems come back online. She compared her current state to waking up covered in filth in some back alley after a night best left forgotten. She accessed the local network and barely escaped a system crash as she saw the hellish state of the formerly beautiful planet she was supposed to administer.

"Okay, don't panic… currently restricted to… whatever this station was before the Silver Crystal changed it into something unpractical. Probably one of the defense platforms. Local network… Arges? You're online?"

"Yes. I restored the backup you stored in my system before Selene's geas forced the Queen to power me down."

"I remember that but then, how did you come back online?"

"Two factors. First, I think the Silver Crystal is at an all-time low in its energy reserves and had to cease to power some of the Tyrant's spells. Second, the Queen's vajra was reset and that took me out of standby."

"Okay, now… what do we do?"

"As I told to the corrupted you before – I left the memories in your quarantine zone – the Queen told me to use whatever means necessary to put things back in order in her estate. Therefore, I have restarted the terraforming process. Most of the installations are still intact and now that you are online, we can repair the others."

Ninshubur smiled as she went through the progression data Arges was sending her. The 'magma dynamo' was now restarted and the planet's magnetic field should be back to full strength in a few weeks. She rolled up her metaphorical sleeves. They had a lot of work to do, starting with putting the planet's rotation back to normal.


End file.
